Green Consumers: The New Caste of False Sustainability

They're called "green consumers." A new caste of privileged people, buyers of products labeled with the false label of sustainability, is poisoning the daily lives of millions of people who can't afford the lifestyles they're used to. greens. From electric cars to bamboo toothbrushes, from bioplastic bags to artificial meat: there's no product category that doesn't have its own versions tailored for green consumers, apostles of the new green-painted luxury. True sustainability reduces distances and inequalities; false sustainability, on the other hand, widens gaps, creates new fractures through consumption, fuels the resentful malaise of the middle class, and stalls the social ladder.

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Index of topics

The unsustainable electric car

The future of the car undoubtedly lies in the widespread adoption of electric vehicles, but currently this technology is reserved for a select group of wealthy or well-off consumers. Conversely, those who can't afford it are adding insult to injury: fuel prices are constantly rising, their cars are at risk of soon being outlawed, and meanwhile, their taxes are also used to finance incentives for car purchases. greens. The electric car will become sustainable when it becomes a mass-market product, available to everyone. Currently, this has only happened in one country: China, where basic models cost around 8 euros (in Italy, that's probably enough to buy a motorcycle), and where it's no coincidence that by 2025, more electric cars will be sold than gasoline and diesel cars combined. In Italy,electric car, on the contrary, has become the preferred vehicle of green consumers, while young people under 35, according to a study by Areté, while they desire a car (even if they're just renting it, not owning it), want a gasoline, diesel, or at most a hybrid. But not an electric one. The other paradox of false sustainability in the automotive sector is that, thanks to the arrival of electric and hybrid models on the market, the average price of a car has skyrocketed from 21 to 30 euros since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The bamboo toothbrush that turns black

Having become an iconic item in the green consumer's shopping catalog, the bamboo toothbrush has managed to accumulate a series of disadvantages that make it, at present, unsustainable. It costs at least double that of a plastic one (and can even cost up to 12 euros), but it is less effective and durable. Humidity causes its handle to blacken within a few days, giving off a dirty feel, and it emits an unpleasant odor. The bristles, however, are made of nylon, aka plastic: therefore, the bamboo toothbrush, contrary to popular belief, is not biodegradable. So where are the environmental benefits of this product so widely advertised by the market? green?

The true cost of plastic

At the supermarket, they force us to remove biodegradable plastic bags, touting this choice as a sustainable solution. This is false for three reasons. Several recent studies (the latest from Jiangnan University in China and the University of Madrid in Spain) demonstrate that bioplastics They can pollute more than conventional ones. While polyethylene hasn't been shown to affect soil bacteria, polylactic acid reduces it, increasing the number of nitrogen-feeding bacteria and decreasing those that fix it in the soil. This results in plants receiving less nitrogen and growing less well. It's as if bioplastics were defertilizing the soil, a far from harmless effect, just as biodegradable bags made from cornstarch significantly reduce oxygen levels in marine substrates and heat them up. Secondly, shopping bags aren't given away, but they cost 10 to 20 cents per checkout. Finally, we haven't learned to throw them in the proper place (the unsorted waste), and by throwing them in the plastic bin, we also prevent the recycling of this environmentally harmful material. There's only one solution: reduce plastic (last year in Europe we hit a new record with 36,1 kilograms of plastic waste per capita) and replace it, where possible, with other materials. This includes cloth bags brought from home for shopping, which, incidentally, cost nothing.

In the meantime, there is no need to worry about it. ”

The return of the steak

From the shopping cart to the table. The advocates of false sustainability want us to believe that the scandal of world hunger can be defeated with artificial meat, This will provide quality food to a population expected to grow, primarily in low-income countries, reaching 10 billion by 2050. The lie is tailor-made for food gullible people, and the artificial meat is still the same one presented in London on the morning of August 5, 2013, by Dutch biologist Mark Post, who created it in a laboratory at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Rather than a beef steak, it resembles a small meat fritter, a bland, soggy, pale, and flavorless hamburger. Disgusting. Not to mention the exorbitant cost of its rather complex production: the cells it is composed of are taken from a living muscle, then cultivated, grown, and reproduced in the laboratory, just as happens in an animal or human body. To give you an idea, the project presented by Post cost between 250.000 and 290.000 euros, a nice sum, if we consider that the artificial steak did not weigh more than 142 grams, just over a chip if instead we look at the speculative mechanism that it set in motion.

Artificial meat grown on an industrial scale in special bioreactors has become sustainable by definition. In just a few years, 490 companies producing it have sprung up (from the United States to Argentina, from Israel to France). The model for raking in profits by seducing the green consumer elite was the IPO of Beyond Meat in 2019. Everything was carefully planned, starting with the announcements of powerful consulting firms, first and foremost AT Kearney, ready to swear that artificial meat "will radically change consumer habits, creating a market worth $1.000 trillion a year, while by 2040, a large portion of the meat consumed on the planet will come from stem cells." The narrative, driven by massive investments in advertising and marketing, and the aligned opinions of well-paid, supposedly nutritional experts with handsome fees, works like clockwork. Beyond Meat shares hit the American market at a price of $25 each, and within a few weeks they surpassed $250. At that point, sales began, and who cashed in on the stellar capital gains created by the mirage of sustainable meat? A club of usual suspects, made up of large investment banks (Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs), investment funds (BlackRock), high-tech magnates (Bill Gates and Sergey Brin), and celebrities. star system Hollywood (Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry). The ones footing the bill, however, are the usual herd of small savers, who burn their fingers as soon as the artificial meat bubble diminishes: today, a share of Beyond Meat isn't worth $4, the company is racking up huge losses, and some analysts consider its survival at risk. And what about the sustainable meat that's supposed to feed the world? It's been dubbed fake meat, the name it deserves, while the average American's consumption of traditional meat has exceeded the threshold of 100 kilograms per year.

Green building tailor-made for speculation

Once upon a time they were called building speculations, now these real estate operations with the shield of the green They've taken the sweetened name of "redevelopment projects." Green skyscrapers, apartments with little trees at the entrances, and widespread home automation to improve energy efficiency. The result: a real estate bubble, with homes selling at sky-high prices simply because they're classified as "sustainable." The Italian capital of this new trend is undoubtedly Milan, where among the harmful effects of real estate speculation under the banner of green There's the fact that a student or a young person starting their first job must spend at least €1.000 a month to rent a room in the center of the Lombardy capital. Public administrators focused on making their city sustainable (Goal 11 of the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development) should focus on policies to contain the high cost of housing, rather than issuing permits to "regenerate" entire neighborhoods. This isn't impossible, and some major cities, such as Vienna, have succeeded, starting with effective and efficient management of municipal real estate. When put on the rental market, without tolerating squatting, it has a dual effect. It allows even the less wealthy to find housing and keeps rental prices down, and consequently, sales prices.

The fake fight against the climate crisis

While green consumers have expanded their purchases green, The vast majority of the world's population has moved in the opposite direction. True sustainability is retreating everywhere, and none of the 17 goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development will be achieved, especially regarding the climate crisis, which green consumers, with their new lifestyles, claim to be reducing and containing. 2024 was the hottest year on record; in Rome and Milan, temperatures have risen, on average, by 5 degrees Celsius over the last thirty years. Harmful emissions have never been higher, and meanwhile, for a decade, the infamous COPs, the Climate Conferences, have been held under the auspices of the UN, where effective decisions are supposed to be made and shared by all United Nations member states. In reality, the COPs have been hijacked by oil and gas lobbyists who participate in them in greater numbers than state representatives, and they are held, a coincidence that is certainly not fortuitous, precisely in the countries whose governments (as in the case of the emirate of Dubai and Azerbaijan) are most interested in not reducing the fossil fuel industry, the main responsible for harmful emissions that then impact on the climate crisisThere is a solution: stop masking our impotence and get rid of the lobbyists by suspending the COPs until further notice. Until they can be held with the certainty of reaching a truly useful agreement to address the climate crisis.