“We can be a bit geeky,” says John Willis, director of research at financial think tank Planet Tracker, “but we like to make sure what people are saying is true. We go through all the footnotes, and everything the auditors say; the devil is often in the detail.”
It may not be the most glamorous of roles, but work Willis and his team do behind the scenes is critical, given the prevalence of increasingly sophisticated greenwashing.
“I don’t think the general public are aware of how widespread this is, and they think quite reasonably that someone must be checking all of this, but until now they haven’t been,” he says.
Last year, Willis came across the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), and the organisation seemed “very worthy. We would love to see plastic waste ended,” he says.
After all, who wouldn’t?
Founded in 2019 in Colorado by 28 businesses, the AEPW’s mission is to “provide solutions to end plastic waste and protect the planet”.
Today the membership...