Tag: environmental sustainability

Humans have known about the importance of clean water for millennia. Yet modern water treatment would be the envy of past civilisations. Through chemicals such as chlorine, we've curtailed the presence of dangerous viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites in our water and food.

Sustainability has become a major investment focus. News headlines frequently point to how investors are sidestepping old energy sources such as coal, favouring greener and more sustainable alternatives. According to the US Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (US SIF), the size of the US sustainable investment since 1995 has increased more than 25-fold, today totalling portfolios worth $16.6 trillion.

The massive fire at the warehouse of chemicals company UPL in Durban has created an environmental disaster whose scale is still not clear, and has put the company into the headlines for all the wrong reasons. While the facts are not yet confirmed, it’s clear that the incident holds many lessons for directors and regulators across all industry sectors.

Being a good corporate citizen means that businesses place people first, respective of their employees and the communities they operate in. Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), routinely used in electrical switchgear poses a significant risk to both human health and the environment based on possible adverse operating conditions, possible leakage, and inappropriate disposal of the equipment at the end of its life cycle.

COVID-19 is simply a symptom of a deadlier underlying issue: our dominant belief that humanity is separate from and above the natural world. This pandemic was predicted in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, in which a 2007 article explicitly referred to the likelihood of further SARS-like viruses linked to the culture of eating exotic mammals in Southern China.

Demonising oil and gas companies is not a constructive way forward on energy transition. Africa will push for 'the Right to Drill'. African nations must and will take advantage of their hydrocarbon resources for economic development. Environmental sustainability is a part of it, not an impediment.

Although South African business leaders may feel somewhat besieged by bad news and murmurs of ‘unbearable’ Eskom tariff hikes, tech-fuelled innovation is providing business with new options to lower energy consumption.