This year we visited our relatives in Asia (Indonesia) for the first time after the Covid period. Having searched for garbage in Germany in the past with my drone (see the following post) I was of course interested in how things behave in Indonesia.

The first result of my garbage search was that you don’t need a drone here, because garbage, especially plastic waste, can be found everywhere. Here are a few photos:

(Plastic waste in the sewage drainage ditch)

(Plastic waste at cultural monuments)

(Animals that are in the garbage)

Result 1: You don’t have to search long and you don’t need high-tech equipment to find garbage in Asia. Everywhere you look, you will find especially plastic waste.

Cleaning up all the garbage is practically impossible. What you often see is that it is simply burned along roads, especially in the evening, with negative effects on nature and the environment.

If you think that Germany is better in this respect, then check out the following statistics, which show that a large part of the German plastic waste is incinerated. Please see Link1 and Link2.

Result 2: As far as waste recycling is concerned, Germany has to fix its own backyard first before pointing on other countries that create more waste mainly because of their larger populations.

In the past, I have already written several articles on sustainability and sustainability reporting in Germany and Europe. Please see Link3.

That’s why I asked myself how big the sustainability consulting market is in Germany. Unfortunately, there are no separate statistics on this, but based on total sales figures and percentage values that can be found in publicly available documents, one can estimate that the total market size is currently around 5 billion Euros. For details, please see Link4 and Link5

Interestingly, these high and expected to increase expenses do not seem to have had a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions in Germany – at least so far – as the 1.9% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2021 to 2022 indicates. Please see Link6.

The picture is much worse when it comes to plastic waste, where energy recovery increased significantly over the last years. See Link7.

One of the main reasons for this seems to be the reduced export of plastic waste to developing countries (Link8)

Result 3: The high expenditure in the area of sustainability consulting does not seem to have had a significant impact on the environment in Germany; at least until now.

The upcoming new regulations in the area of environmental and sustainability reporting in the EU and Germany, such as CSRD, Supply Chain Act, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, etc., are expected to lead to a further increase in corporate spending for sustainability consulting.

Due to the previously mentioned little success and the fact that climate and environmental protection issues are global problems that do not stop at man-made borders, I wonder whether at least part of the money spent on sustainability reporting in Germany could not be invested more useful elsewhere? One idea would be that you could e.g. 1% of the expenditure spent on sustainability reporting is directly invested in environmental projects implemented in developing countries.

What is your opinion on this?