Sustainability & The Everyday Consumer
Sustainability is at a critical turning point, and while individual actions matter, the real responsibility lies with corporations that have historically driven carbon emissions. Many companies use greenwashing tactics, promoting carbon neutrality through offsets rather than making real reductions. Casual Films acknowledges this challenge and is committed to sustainable practices, ensuring its operations and communications align with genuine environmental impact reduction.
Transcript
Let's talk about sustainability. We all want to be responsible citizens and live our lives in a sustainable way, but we're at a tipping point where that simply isn't enough. We've all seen the headlines. Insurers in California are pausing home insurance policies because of the risk of wildfire. We see reports that developed nations owe 192 trillion for the role that they played in climate change.
We all have a role to play, but as individual consumers, we have to face the simple fact, our actions alone are not enough, but for a long time, This has been the narrative we can all think of pieces of communications from the world's biggest brands that have shaped the way that we think about sustainability around the individual.
So let's dig into this a little bit. How did we get to this part of the discussion? The very first ad or PSA around environmentalism or sustainability came out in 1971, just a year after the very first Earth Day in 1970. The ad was deeply problematic for a lot of reasons- appropriating Native American culture, greenwashing. It was simply an ad that would not run today. But PSAs like this rose to prominence over the last 40 years. And part of the reason why is because young people in the 1970s were ringing the alarm bell about the environmental issues of the day. And a lot of the biggest companies and the biggest polluters went on a mission to make sure that their brand was projected in the general mindset as a green brand or a brand that was trying to do the right thing.
Even the term carbon footprint was coined back in the early 2000s, again to put the focus of carbon emissions back on the consumer. Obviously this is a very nuanced discussion. Consumers collectively can make a difference, and we know that it is better to live your life as sustainably as you personally can.
But the narrative changed about 10 years ago, when a researcher published this study, which found that a minority of companies had created an outsized amount of carbon emissions in the last 200 odd years. Companies today are really focused on on being carbon neutral. So what exactly does that mean? It means that that company has committed to emitting a certain number of carbon emissions, and then doing other measures to equally offset the number of emissions that they've already output.
This basically means that you could be flying around the world to do business and then plant X number of trees in a forest that captures that amount of carbon, and therefore you are net zero. But a new study found that this is a flawed idea. Verge writes. Without strong reductions in emissions, the paper concludes that this strategy has a low potential to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
This idea of carbon neutrality and carbon offsets is a byproduct of free market environmentalism. The idea here is that if you want something to be done effectively, you should let companies practice that on the free market and they will compete against each other in order to achieve the best possible outcome.
But is that really the case? The BBC writes, companies might profit. from promoting an environmental change without actually working to reduce their emissions. And that's the big problem of greenwashing, which has now become widely understood as the real outcome of free market environmentalism. Instead, a company that wants to take real action should audit the number of carbon emissions that they currently output and make real changes to put into place how they can reduce that emission that they already output rather than looking at carbon offsets.
They certainly help. It's not a totally terrible thing. way to address the climate emergency is better than nothing, but real true change means looking at yourself, how many emissions you as a company put out and putting in a plan to reduce those by a significant percentage. So why is it so hard for companies to report and reduce their carbon emissions?
Well, it's because there's a lot of different types and these are generally divided into three different scopes. Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions, those that a company is emitting by doing things it can directly control. Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions created by the production of energy that a company might get from its utilities providers. And Scope 3 are also indirect emissions, but by things that a company has no control over, like the way the consumers might dispose of their products or emissions that their suppliers might create while making material goods for that company. It's no secret that reducing your carbon emissions is complicated, but we're at a moment of inflection now where consumers are demanding it.
McKinsey and Company reports, the 2020s may mark the beginning of a fundamental shift for corporations, from pure profit maximization to a new approach to growth, one that gives due weight to the health of society and the planet. Sustainability has already become an integral part of business decision making.
Consumers and corporate purchasers are increasingly Considering carbon footprints when they make buying and investment decisions. Today's consumers are very attuned to greenwashing and we're at an age where they have infinite information at their fingertips, which means that a company that doesn't walk the walking cliff by their green and sustainable values is not going to succeed in the long run.
So what are we doing about it? Casual is a company of over a hundred people, and we have six offices around the globe, and a lot of the work that we do is making communications, a lot of times around sustainability for the world's biggest brands, and we have to reconcile the work that we do and the way that our business is aligned to some of the world's biggest brands' communication plans, and we hope that our clients and our future potential clients take the sustainability mission seriously. We want to partner with clients and brands that are committed to making the world is sustainable and greener place for the generations to come. And we know that communications and video communications are a powerful tool to be able to communicate your message and what you as a brand or company are indeed doing to do your part.
So what's casual doing to do our part? We have an environmental working group that meets bi monthly to investigate the trends of the day, the way that our sets are run and the way that our operations work in order to make sure that we are following the most sustainable practices in every level of our organization.
And even the way that casual has grown has been in line with the sustainability mission. We have six offices all around the globe, which means that we no longer need to send crews transcontinentally. We are intentional about building offices in the communities in which we operate. And those offices are studios that create jobs, that create opportunities, and also allow us to service those clients locally in terms of the communities that we operate in.
The takeaway here is that even if you are a medium but mighty company like Casual, or if you're a multi million dollar global organization, you need to do your part to take a look at your carbon emissions and meaningfully reduce them so we can all do our part as businesses and as corporations to curb the climate crisis.
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