In the 90’s, the music industry had the idea that, recording labels being a business, should be run by accountants and lawyers, instead of musicians. The result was music which was disposable, made to last the famous Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of glory. Music was clearly led by profits and not by art. Ultimately, musicians and those passionate about music realised the system was garbage and, thus, there was no sense of guilt when it came to downloading music over new systems such as Napster.
Naturally the music industry blamed piracy rather than the music product itself for the downfall in sales to the point of the market falling to only 25% of its original size. They could not understand that “music” needs to be run by “musicians”, and useless were the words of top musicians such as Bono when they claimed that “Piracy did not kill the music industry, bad music did”.
Recently we saw how Elon Musk called ESG “an outrageous scam” after Tesla lost its spot on an “S&P” Global index that tracks companies on their environmental, social and governance standards. Musk’s outrage was reflected in the number of tweets on the matter highlighting the flaws in the system.
Now, one would ask what is the S&P (Standard and Poor’s) knowledge about ESG in the first place. For ESG, or “Environmental and Social Governance”, is based on standards and measurements, which are based on SCIENCE. For example, the amount of carbon generated by a company depends on experimentation, papers and studies. This requires biologists, ecologists, chemists and other field specialists to generate experiments, calculate the numbers and derive a final value.
Instead, we find the same lawyers and accountants at S&P as in the recording labels of the 90’s. Would you trust your life to a hospital ran by accountants? No way, you’d expect doctors to run it. Would you drive a car built by lawyers? Never, you’d expect it to be built by engineers. Likewise, would you trust a number on the amount of carbon produced by an accountant?
So, today ESG which translates to “Economics of Simply Gaining”, a model which is not based on science and hard facts but simply of what brings the most financial benefit. The end result which we saw in the music industry and most likely the market will say the culprit is not using the wrong people for the job, but probably mother nature herself.
We at TeknTrash can proudly say our CEO is a biologist, we have an ESG Director who has a PHD in Biotechnology from Imperial College and a BSc (Hon.) in Microbiology from Kings College London, and ultimately being led by one of the world’s top 6 scientists.
ESG for us is not a business but life. Not an end just to look pretty on a shareholder’s meeting, but a tool to improve life. So, when we claim our recycling reward system (Stipra) can offer real and accountable carbon credits based on the amount of methane not generated due to improper disposal of a product, we mean it, and we can prove it scientifically. We dare any accountant-based system to disprove us. This is real assurance we can give to companies, real Environmental and Social Governance instead of Economics of Simply Gaining.
