How Sustainability Leads Are Actually Reading The Data Centre Backlash

Hey, thanks so much for listening. I would love to be able to help you more on what it is that you are listening to and why you're listening to, to me. If you could click on the link in the show notes, that would be awesome because it will help me define what it is that we should be talking about on this podcast. I'm Will Richardson, and this is Sustainability Solved, where I've been working in sustainability for over 25 years and speaking in public about it for over 35 years. Before we start, we spent 30 years cleaning up the air over Europe. It worked. And it has made the warming faster. One team at ETH Zurich now thinks the same emissions could produce about 25% more warming than we previously believed. Stay to the end and I will give you that one in full, plus 2 more facts that belong in front of your board. This week in sustainability, here are your top 10 stories ranked by what the world is talking about most. Number 10: Plastic Overshoot Day Arrives Early. And the film is the problem. So food and beverage, the pouches, films, and wrappers on your lines are now the single biggest packaging problem in the room. One-third of all plastic waste generated in 2026 will be dumped, burned, or littered, according to research covered by Eddy this week. In the same few days, Colgate-Palmolive, Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Procter& Gamble, and Unilever pooled their intellectual property to crack flexible packaging. And they are going after the right target. Flexibles account for about 80% of the plastics reaching the ocean, and they are the fastest-growing format on the shelf. Number 9: Advertising and green claims get gets squeezed again. So, relevant for media marketing and advertising, the space in which a green claim can legally run just got smaller twice in one week. Bristol banned high-carbon advertising on council-owned sites covering fossil fuels and ultra-fast fashion. The Advertising Standards Authority called out eco-claims from Thomas Cook. Love Holidays, and Islay Flight, arguing that putting the word eco inside the brand name does not remove the need for evidence. And Shein, listed in Hong Kong at about, I think it was $27 billion after failing in London and New York, with analysts putting environmental and labour exposure squarely in the valuation. Number 8: Nature targets stop being a niche. Food— this is relevant food and beverage and anyone with an agricultural or marine supply chain. Nature reporting is now on the same track carbon was 5 years ago. Waitrose and Novo Nordisk validated new science-based targets this week, with Waitrose among the first to set them for seafood. More than 733 organizations have now committed to the TNF-DEBT Framework. The World Economic Forum puts around $44 trillion of economic value— more than half of global GDP— as moderately or highly dependent on nature. This is not an environmental statistic. It is a supply risk statistic. Carbon accounting consolidates and the AI shortcut gets caught out. Every organization over £100 million turnover should be looking at this. The software you selected 2 years ago may not be the company you deal with next year. Greenly acquired Normative at an implied $75 million valuation, the latest in a year of carbon accounting deals. In the same week, research found AI-generated product carbon footprints are prone to misleading results across 175 products tested, with the workings often wrong even when the headline number looked plausible. If you cannot see the steps, you cannot use the number to change a supplier. Number 6: Overshoot becomes the official plan. This is broadly relevant to any organisation. Your climate scenario analysis is probably modelling a world nobody now expects. The UN Environment Programme's Limiting Overshoot report concludes that even if every government delivers every pledge in full, warming peaks at around 1.8 degrees centigrade. Separate research published this week puts 2.3 degrees centigrade as the most likely outcome, with fossil CO2 falling from 38.1 gigatons in 2025 to 27.5 by 2050. Most corporate stress tests still run 1.5°C and 4°C. Neither is the middle of the road. Another quarter, another target quietly moved. This is relevant to food and beverage and retail. Every peer that moves a goalpost changes what your own board thinks normal looks like. A Target pushed its net-zero date back to 2050, up to a decade later than planned, and delayed its Scope 3 goal. Having cut value-chain emissions well ahead of schedule in 2022 and 2023, Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Starbucks have all softened commitments. Europe's 7 largest truck manufacturers asked for a 3-year delay to the 2030 CO2 rules. Walmart missed all of its 2025 packaging pledges. Number 4: The extreme heat lands on the P&L. Everyone with staffed sites, suppliers, or crops need to look at this. Heat has stopped being a risk register entry and and started being a cost line. The Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics, with the Euro-Mediterranean Centre of Climate Change, put one severe week of June heat at roughly £1.15 billion of lost UK output and 24 million working hours. French winemakers forecast a 30-year low harvest, of just under 34 million hectolitres, with Champagne close to half last year's volume. In the United States, 69 million people had at least 30 days of risky heat added by climate change this summer. Number 3: The reporting rulebook gets rewritten in a single week. If you report in the EU or the UK, Your 2027 compliance plan changed while you were reading something else. MEPs on the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee backed an SFDR rewrite by 37 votes to 9. The European Parliament adopted its CBAM position by 464 to 50, expanding the carbon border tax to downstream products and removing the emergency brake. The UK government opened a consultation on removing mandatory non-financial disclosures, and the Commission proposed putting sustainability criteria into the €2.5 trillion public procurement market, which is the part that will actually shape and change supplier behaviour. Number 2: The United States pulls the plug on power plant carbon rules. US operations and US supply chains. Federal regulation has stopped being the thing that drives your American timeline. The Environmental Protection Agency repealed Biden-era greenhouse gas limits for coal- and gas-fired power stations and proposed rescinding the finding that gives it the authority to regulate them at all. Its own projection is 123 million additional tons of carbon. Environmental groups sued within days. For anyone planning US capital investment, regulatory whiplash is now the risk, not the regulation itself. And number one, as always, data centers and AI who pays the power bill. This is really for anyone And any business. This is the story that's now shaping electricity prices, planning policy, and public opinion in every market you operate in. Google committed €13 billion to Finland, underwritten by a 22-year nuclear power purchase agreement with Fortum. Massachusetts became the first US state to require new data centres to bring in their own clean power. Scotland now mandates environmental impact assessments for them. The US House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act by 417 votes to 3, and 84% of Americans say they are worried about data centers pushing up local electricity prices. Google, Nvidia, and Anthropic joined a 20-member coalition to make data centers flexible power users. And somehow data centers are not on the COP 31 agenda in Antalya. So top 3 mind-blowing environmental facts from this week. Cleaning up our air is speeding up global warming. Sulfur aerosols from burning coal and oil reflected sunlight and brightened clouds. Clean air removes them And one study estimates that added around half a degree to summer warming in Western Europe alone. Analysis from ETH Zurich suggests the same emissions could produce about 25% more warming than we previously thought. The irony. I mean, it wouldn't be happening in the first place if we weren't burning the fossil fuels. But this will give the lobbyists and Others' arguments. It's, it's just that we have to know what's going on. We have to understand what is out there and the research that's been happening. Number 2: one week of heat in June cost the UK economy about £1.15 billion and 24 million working hours. That is the Conservative figure. A third of people surveyed said that heat reduced the effort they could put into their work, and that loss was excluded from their calculation entirely. And flexible packaging at number 3. The films and pouches account for 80% of plastic finding its way into the ocean. It is also the fastest-growing packaging format in the world. If you want to be a part of our network, please DM me or comment or email me at podcast@sustainabilitysolved.org.

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