Thursday 21 September 2023

Could Holcim ever be a ‘CO2 hero’?

Holcim – cement conglomerate and parent company of Aggregate Industries – has been entertaining members of the press at its new Innovation Hub in Lyon, which the company has apparently set up to "showcase its sustainable building solutions and serve as a co-creation lab to accelerate low-carbon, circular and energy-efficient building worldwide."

Remarkably, somebody has come away thinking Holcim is a CO2 hero. How – given that the company has annual CO2 emissions more than many countries – could that possibly be?

Has Holcim dramatically cut its CO2 emissions to net zero – rather than just talk about it? Not according to its 2022 Sustainability Report, where we find Holcim pumped some 78 million tons of CO2 (scope 1 emissions) into the atmosphere in 2022 alone. Holcim claims: 
We reduced Scope 1 emissions to 562 kg CO2 net per ton of cementitious materials, which represented a decrease of 2% on a like-for-like basis versus the prior year. 
Of course, continued progress at that rate and the game’s over. 

Dig a little deeper though and we find that the press at Lyon were briefed by Nollaig Forrest, Holcim’s new chief sustainability officer. Her background is not in science, climate or sustainability, but – according to this article – in "communications and corporate affairs at multiple industrial companies". It’s clearly important to Holcim, with such glacial progress in emission cuts, to at least tell a good story. 

So how did Holcim persuade this journalist of its hero status?


Towards the end of his article, the author in question writes this paragraph: 
What strikes me most about Holcim is how a company can go from villain to hero by embracing the future. When I spoke to Jenisch, [Holcim CEO] he was adamant that the concrete industry wasn’t anything like the tobacco or car industry, fleeing from its responsibilities. And Holcim itself is a future-oriented company, he said, that wants to do its part. "Now that we know the harmful effect [of CO2], we are fully on it," he said. "We are part of the solution." Though the past is "interesting," he said, "it’s more important what action we take now. This is where we want to be part of. It’s more important that we accelerate climate action, with speed and transparency. We don’t want to be greenwashing." 
So, embrace the future, forget about all the damage caused by your past emissions and providing climate reparations for affected communities, keep selling cement at more than 0.5 tons net of CO2 for every ton produced, and become a CO2 hero. Easy. 

But let’s unpack that paragraph above.  

Holcim's CEO claims the concrete industry isn’t fleeing from its responsibilities, however that is exactly what Holcim is doing in the case of Indonesian islanders seeking proportionate compensation from the company for damage to their livelihoods due to repeated flooding as global warming has driven up sea levels, arguing that the company is responsible for 0.477% of global industrial emissions from 1950 to 2021. A spokesman for Holcim said: 
We do not believe that court cases focused on single companies are an effective mechanism to tackle the global complexity of climate action. 

And as far as accelerating climate action, we only have to look at this tiny corner of East Devon, and subsidiary Aggregate Industries' plans for an unsustainable multi-million mile haulage scheme for Straitgate Farm, to tell us all we need to know. But NGOs backing the islanders’ action also claim the company is not doing enough to cut its emissions: 
There is some support for this position from a new report by Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, which ranked Holcim high relative to most of the other 23 companies studied for its net-zero ambition and transparency, but said its strategy only had moderate integrity because it hinges on energy intensity targets, low-quality renewable energy certificates and extensive use of carbon capture storage and usage. 
Finally, when it comes to "we don’t want to be greenwashing", Holcim appears to have put a brake on its Twitter account, but this was one of its last tweets. Greenwashing? You decide.

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