Brianne West: from shampoo to fizzy drinks with no water (not much anyways)
In Aotearoa New Zealand, we throw away a staggering 97 million single-use plastic drinks containers each year, with less than 7% of those ever getting recycled. Seems dumb especially when most of that drink is water. Brianne West is the founder of Ethique, the eco-beauty products business that took water out of cosmetics and saved millions of tons of plastic, water and emissions in the process. Ethique exports to more than 20 countries and was sold in 2020. Brianne is turning that success in beauty to fizzy drinks - called Incrediballs - and she joins Vincent. We have a climate policy problem in NZ that might be useful to share. Our ETS offers carbon credits primarily based on permanent pine forests. To meet our net zero 2050 we'll need to double our pine forests to 2.8mha. Pine trees are cheap, grow fast, and absorb lots of carbon in their first 25 years. Sounds good, right? Not necessarily. After 25 years growth rates slow and the trees start to die at 80. The forests tend to be mono-crops, are hostile to native flora and fauna, and are susceptible to fire, pests and storms. They also are being planted on farmland. And because there's so much planting unit prices are low and businesses find it cheaper to pay to offset their emissions, rather than invest in technology to reduce their emissions.In fact some modelling suggests the supply of units generated by the planting of forests may exceed the number needed by emitters!Our government is under huge pressure to change the ETS settings to better incentivise:- restoring native forests- reducing gross emissions- investing in biodiversity