To achieve its new climate objective – a 55% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 compared to 1990 – the European Union is relying heavily on its “carbon market”, which it wishes to extend to new sectors with tougher rules. In France, the anti-waste law for a circular economy (Agec) of 2020 provides, by 2025, for the creation of eleven “Extended Producer Responsibility” sectors, from toys to cigarettes to fishing gear. Like those already in place, the idea is to force the producers, importers and distributors of these products – which will become waste – to ensure their end of life.
The common point ? Everytime, the “polluter pays” principle applies. The idea is to make polluters bear the cost of preventing, reducing and combating the pollution they generate. And hope, by giving a cost to this pollution, that practices evolve. And it works ? Not really, say Flora Berlingen. The author, former president of Zero Waste NGOpublish this thursdayI Harm Permit (ed. Street of the chessboard), which retraces the history of this principle and points out its many weaknesses. She responds to 20 minutes.
Has this “polluter pays” principle become the main mechanism through which States hope for carbon neutrality?
Yes, and not only on this issue of carbon neutrality. It has become a cornerstone of all environmental policies. Admittedly, alongside other major principles of environmental law such as precaution, prevention, public information, etc. But “polluter pays” is the most highlighted. It is not new. It is often presented as the invention of British economist Arthur Cecil Pigou in the 1920s, even if we can go back even earlier. But it was really in the last quarter of the 20th century that the “polluter pays” formula emerged and made its appearance in the legal field.
It can be found in various forms today: carbon markets, REP sectors. But also “ecological compensation”, which has forced in France, since 1976 *, a large number of project leaders (buildings, infrastructures, etc.) to compensate for damage to the environment that they have not been able to avoid or reduce enough.
Are new forms still emerging today?
This is the case of voluntary clearing markets. It is, for example, these investments that large companies are multiplying in reforestation projects in order to offset their greenhouse gas emissions that they consider incompressible. This allows them to complete their roadmaps towards carbon neutrality.
These compensations are no longer limited to the climate issue: we see companies which, to compensate for the plastic they continue to have in their packaging, finance waste collections on beaches.
Why do we rely so much on this principle?
On paper, he has a very seductive side. Even as a citizen, we want to believe in it. “Polluter pays” brings us back to an intuitive principle that we all learned as a child: taking responsibility for our actions. It also gives a price to damage to the environment, which makes it possible, in a way, to integrate this pollution into the costs of the company that generates it. It is all the hope of the economists who have theorized this principle: that companies have every interest in reducing these attacks which impact their competitiveness or that consumers sanction them by moving towards the cheapest products, supposed to be the most virtuous. . It’s a very optimistic view.
You also say that companies often find their account in this mechanism….
It allows them to pull the rug out from under legislators before they introduce binding regulations. Instead, companies set up a framework that is suitable for them, if not preferable, which allows them to continue the business. as usual.
A textbook case isa REP “household packaging” sector, established in 1992 and which served as models for many others in France and Europe. Faced with the concern of local authorities, faced with the explosion of waste management costs, and foreseeing the creation of a tax on those [producteurs, distributeurs, importateurs…] who put packaging on the market, the latter convinced them to set up a “voluntary” approach system instead. They each pay a financial contribution which is used to finance the end of life of their packaging which has become waste. Everything is managed by an eco-organization, admittedly approved by the State, but managed by the companies themselves. And to whom, little by little, a certain number of decisions have been delegated. While reduction and prevention were initially included in the sector’s objectives, the aim of these players was much more to create the conditions for their packaging to become acceptable because it was roughly treated correctly.
Thirty years later, the annual tonnage of packaging placed on the market in France was around 20% higher than in the early 1990s, while the population has only increased by 15%. On this reduction aspect, this EPR sector is a failure and has delayed the introduction of more radical measures. It is in this that the polluter-pays principle can become a license to harm, because it authorizes industrialists to pollute as long as they can pay the price.
Is this price often too low?
Whatever the mechanism – carbon market, EPR, compensation… – there is very often a discrepancy between the sums paid – when we manage to get paid – and the environmental damage or the withdrawal of resources. The financing of water agencies, which steers the management of this resource in France, is an illustration of this. They receive a fee paid in proportion to consumption and the use made of it, whether you are an individual, a farmer or an industrialist. This charge is supposed to reflect the polluter-pays principle. However, in February 2015, the Court of Auditors deplored a move away from this principle from 2007, so much so that in 2013, royalties from households represented 87% of water agency resources, compared to 6% from agricultural activities and 8% from industry. These proportions do not reflect the respective pollution levels. And we could give other examples.
This is not the only discrepancy with this polluter-pays principle. It also allows polluters to give the illusion that by restoring natural areas elsewhere, their projects will be without net loss of biodiversity. We postulate ecological equivalences between what will be destroyed and what will be created, without any guarantee that the compensatory actions will have the desired effects. This is to forget that our knowledge of the functioning of ecosystems remains limited.
In reality, the results that can be drawn from ecological compensation are very mixed. And carbon offsetting is no better. It is even surprising that the strategies announced by these large companies, which each provide for tens of millions of trees to be planted, are not more questioned about their feasibility, if only on the area that should be monopolized.
Should we put an end to this polluter-pays principle?
There are perhaps a few counterexamples that have been effective in specific contexts. But overall, this principle is based on too many assumptions. The first, finally, is that we can give a price to what is priceless: the value of a natural site, of a protected species. Politicians often act as if this debate was settled, when it is not.
It is also necessary to turn away from the “polluter pays” for democratic reasons. It imposes an approach by calculating environmental issues, rather than by deliberation, which would require questioning the merits of any project. The polluter-payer asks the question of “how are we going to deal with pollution?” and “for what price?” without asking the question of “why?” “. It is this that must be placed at the center of the debate. In other words: what are the pollutions that we agree to let operate in a society because they meet needs that we consider fundamental?