Sleep tight Citizens, our products are eco-friendly...

OPEN LETTER to manufacturers, influencers, the media, decision-makers, marketers, communicators and more generally to any animal gifted with speech, reason, common sense and intellectual honesty, to henceforth and forever ban the term "eco-material" (and its many variations and variants: 'responsible material', 'respectful', 'green', 'sustainable', etc.) of our brochures, articles, reports, posts, tweets, directives, pitches, storytellings, discussions and other chatter. This language is inept, counterproductive and ultimately deadly for our future, for three main reasons (and many others):

It was a very attractive hypothesis which I nevertheless had to abandon because it turned out to be false... (Sacha Guitry)

1/ eco-material = nonsense

It is absurd to attach to the term "material" a description which would definitively place it on the side of the good guys for the planet, as opposed to supposedly bad materials which should be banned if we care about our future. This binary outlook of problem/solution is a tempting lure, a sort of cognitive bias in our brains which enjoy nothing so much as simple things, but it is an attractive hypothesis which we must nevertheless discard, because it is false. There are no good and bad materials in this story but, as it turns out, good and bad uses of materials, with the fundamental imperative to use as little as possible, of being as energy-efficient as possible, and to think from the genesis of a project about the follow-up to be given, and the end of the story. And that changes everything, because the same material can be the least bad solution in one case, and a totally deleterious path in a different context. Therefore, trying to use materials on a case-by-case basis, and with parcimony, in a smarter way, is a fruitful approach, while assigning an ex nihilo rating, or even creating an environmental index for different families of materials, makes absolutely no sense.

Lentils, coffee, and even mushrooms are becoming key components of more ecological vehicles, paving the way for sustainable and revolutionary mobility. (crappy “journalist” )

2/ eco-material = dead end

This idea that we could globally and gradually improve and 'green' our modes of production and consumption by generalizing the use of more virtuous materials (sic) is comfortable and reassuring because we give ourselves the impression of, at least, working in the common sense. Certainly not fast enough, not far enough, but don't we say that it is the small streams that make the big rivers, that the hummingbird must do its part, however modest it may be, etc? That is to deny nature and especially the extent of the problem, because acting on details is not only ineffective, but it becomes an obstacle to real, deeper actions, and in a way the ?proverbial tree that hides the forest. This reassuring feeling is a bit like believing that we could, armed with a simple thimble, empty a bathtub while leaving the two taps wide open. We have never solved a systemic problem with cosmetic solutions; it is a dangerous denial of reality to believe so. Not seeing, or pretending not to see, that the problem comes from elsewhere only reinforces our inaction. No, the illusory “eco-material” will not save us, it only comforts and blinds us to the truth.

Let us note the formidable resilience of the capitalist system, its pathetic talent for ingesting observations of predation and turning them into potential allies... (Aurélien Barrau, hairy astrophysicist)

3/ eco-material = Trojan horse

The large global groups, unable to deny the general awareness of consumers in the face of future disorders and therefore their desire to act at the individual level, turn into zealous champions of virtuous production, promoting the emergence of all these pseudo-innovations, bio-inspired, bio-manufactured, bio-sourced, bio-logical, bio-degradable, bio-bullshit materials. They sponsor all the events which carry this message of a possible redemption of humanity thanks to a finally clean production, thus trying to be perceived as the outpost, the spearheads of this new way of producing... Little by little the idea is instilled that the party can continue if production now becomes responsible, carbon neutral, compensated, virtuous, sustainable, eco-compatible. In short, everything is done so that, above all, the productive machine does not slow down. Sleep tight people, and above all, keep consuming, we still have things to grab, amen!

In an absolute cynicism, feeling that the current is buoyant, these multinationals are trying their best, while there is still time, to squeeze the lemon until to the last drop. Paint the facade green, so that nothing changes fundamentally for as long as possible, before the inevitable.

We stop everything, we think... and it's not sad (Georges Blondeaux, aka Gébé)

It could have been simply disconcerting twenty years ago to note the manichean poverty of our thoughts on the exploitation of the finite resources of our planet, then uncomfortable to see that this ambient discourse on good and bad materials could be a brake on real beginnings of solutions, but it now becomes indecent to let oneself be lulled into sleep, or even to reproduce and disseminate these nonsense, without reflection, without critical thinking, without an ounce of salutary lucidity.

That the factories are there to produce, of course. That the goal of businesses is to sell and generate profit is the very logic of the economic system in which we are immersed. So we can't be offended by it, unless we want to change it. But nothing forces us to be fooled, to swallow without blinking certain nonsense of commercial arguments, or the shortcuts and semantic approximations oriented, without exercising the slightest perspective and without using our brain. Because this then amounts to becoming complicit in a predation that becomes obscene, agreeing to be the useful idiots in the pursuit of our inaction.

Without trying to clumsily quote the great Albert, let's start by naming things correctly. The search for accuracy in the words used ensures that we do not make the realities of our world invisible or distort them; this requirement is necessary to correctly understand the problems and try to deal with them.

matériO'