The plastic bottle problem and investment in renewable energy
By Laura
In preparation for the class in South Africa, I’ve been researching electricity access in the country. Energy access is critical to so many other parts of life. If children have homework to do in the evening, they need light to be able to read their textbooks. Economic growth slows if businesses can only operate during daylight hours or cannot count on power sources to run tools or machinery. Electric-powered tools are more efficient for farming, but are expensive to operate and are not environmentally-friendly. Burning fuels can have negative impacts on health, and often women are disproportionately required to devote time to gathering wood for their families. The impacts on education, gender equality, public health, economic development, and more are wide-ranging and long-term.
The most accessible option for a lot of people is to run diesel or petrol-powered generators. It illustrates the ways that environmentally-conscious decisions are not always a realistic option. If you can’t rely on national utilities to provide electricity to your home, you may not have the luxury to decide to install solar panels for power. The diesel solution is good enough, and therefore many individual decisions based on per-family ability to pay allow the larger systemic issue to continue.
Without a collective infrastructure change, such as a shift to renewable energy on the national scale, the status quo functions well enough to make major changes a challenge.
The parallel that came to mind for me is bottled water usage in areas where tap water is unsafe to drink. I’ve spent time in Cambodia, where local tap water is contaminated due to poorly sealed pipes. Without tap water as an option, many people in cities drink bottled water and use it to brush their teeth. The government doesn’t see the urgency to deal with the infrastructure issues that cause the water to be unsafe because bottled water is prevalent and cheap enough to “solve” the issue. The “plastic bottle problem” – a good enough answer that prevents long-term investment in a solution – provides a work-around for Cambodia, at least for those people who can readily access purified water. As of 2014, UNICEF estimated that only 40% of Cambodians in rural areas had access to clean water, and those who did not were at higher risk of disease and arsenic poisoning due to mining run-off into the Mekong River and its tributaries.
There’s a movement across Southeast Asia to encourage people to “Refill, Not Landfill.” In Siem Reap, Cambodia, the program provides filtered water at refill stations around the city and sells branded metal bottles. The program is championed by business owners concerned with the environment, but is not solving the underlying infrastructure issues that lead to a lack of clean water. Cambodians may be able to make individual choices to reduce bottled water usage by adopting more sustainable water purification methods, but for many people in rural areas there aren’t many options available.
When looking into energy access and renewable energy in South Africa, I see similar issues. The national government has taken steps to encourage renewable energy development through its Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Programme, which seeks to encourage private sector investment in renewable energy infrastructure. Despite positive steps towards renewable energy, there is still significant resistance to investment in this area. Opponents argue that renewable energy will lead to job losses in the coal industry and be too costly for nationally-owned utilities to implement. To me, this seems like the plastic bottle problem again. Coal is working well enough, and it would cost too much upfront to change to renewables.
In the meantime, load shedding has caused rolling blackouts.
Wealthier consumers can seek other options, such as installing their own solar generators, but people without financial means have few other places to turn than to diesel-powered generators. If their area isn’t even served by the existing power grid, the options are more limited still. They may want to pursue an environmentally sustainable choice, but can’t make the individual upfront investment to do so. The environmental divide is further exacerbated by the socioeconomic divide, since people with more power can afford to find other solutions and therefore reduce the sense of urgency for a collective action solution.
However, it has been exciting to see through my research that a number of public and private organizations are looking for ways to increase energy access and sustainable solutions in South Africa. I’m looking forward to learning more once we’re in Johannesburg.