Good morning community!

Great meetup yesterday with Denise Santana, JP Morgan and Vishal Hindocha, MFS Investment Management. Thank you for those who joined us, share your feedback and thoughts. I will share the notes on what was discussed later on on the platform as well. During his presentation and live Q&A Vishal mentioned that ESG and Sustainability are not free, they come with trade-offs. 

This morning I thought I'd share an interesting article from Financial Times on how the worlds' biggest toymaker (Lego) maintains that making toys from recycled bottles will have higher carbon footprint. The company is indeed analysing its complex trade offs in search of sustainability. Niels Christiansen, chief executive of the family-owned Danish group, told the Financial Times that using recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) would have led to higher carbon emissions over the product's lifetime as it would have required new equipment.

Lego's change of tactics highlights the difficult decisions facing companies on sustainability where different targets such as eliminating the use of fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions can come into conflict. Lego is now aiming to make each constituent part of ABS - acrylonitrile butadiene styrene - more sustainable by gradually incorporating more bio-based and recycled material. The group intends to triple its spending on sustainability to DKr3bn ($430mn) a year by 2025, and Christiansen conceded that could hurt its profit margins as it would not pass on the higher cost of buying sustainable materials to consumers.

Then when you google "biobased plastics" you get a lot of information on companies offering those solutions. 

How viable are those business models and how scalable are those bio-plastic technologies? Should/Will fossil fuel companies play a role in creating bio-based materials? What do you think?