In May 2025, Kenya told tea factories to stop pursuing Rainforest Alliance certification. The audit costs were landing on factories and, through green-leaf pricing, on the farmers. The buyers who required the seal were not funding it.

A September 2026 briefing from the Global Risk and Regeneration Institute set out what that means at scale. More than 680,000 Kenyan smallholders depend on tea for their livelihoods. Annual certification costs for factories ran between Ksh 384,000 and Ksh 420,000. The United Kingdom accounts for around eight per cent of Kenya’s tea exports.

“they want ethically sourced tea, but they’re not paying for it. The farmers paying for it,” says Zahra Afshar, General Counsel at Ahmad Tea.

The suspension was later lifted. The cost structure was not resolved.

The problem with the checklist

Zahra Afshar trained as a barrister and spent her early career in criminal defence and human rights law. She joined Ahmad Tea as General Counsel in 2014. The company sells to more than 90 countries. Her role now covers sustainability and social impact.

She is not hostile to certification in principle. It provides a minimum standard and has raised levels across tea-growing regions. But the model has drifted from its intent.

“It’s become a sort of vacuous checklist,” she said. “Rather than meaningful progress to do things like close living wage gap or raise living standards in a way which properly benefits livelihoods.”

The structure of Kenya’s industry sharpens the problem. Large estates can absorb audit costs and demonstrate real improvement. Smallholders farming one or two acres bring leaf to a co-operative factory, which carries the certification burden to access export markets. The smallholder on that acre sees little of the benefit. And the data generated by compliance sits outside Kenya, held by the certification body.

“Effectively the farmers are giving their data away and they’re not custodians of their own information,” Zahra said. “data is is power especially now.”

A UK buyer pays the same price for certified Kenyan tea as a buyer in a market with no certification requirement. Sometimes, she noted, the non-certified markets pay better.

One brand’s response

Ahmad Tea does not own its tea gardens. The tea workers in those gardens are not its direct responsibility. That has long been the industry’s reason not to act beyond its legal boundary.

The company decided to act anyway. After examining what its third-party sustainability arrangements were actually producing on the ground, it built a programme called Hand Picked Profit Shared: digital bonus payments, held on trust, sent directly to tea workers’ bank accounts. Not a substitute for wages. A share of profit.

Tea is predominantly hand-picked. The majority of that workforce is women.

“How can we give visibility to that workforce who through history have been invisible,” Zahra said.

Making payments digital required workers to have bank accounts, which became the mechanism for a wider shift. Financial literacy workshops run alongside the programme.

“I mean, it just felt like the right thing to do,” she said.

Whether it is sufficient is a different question.

The harder problem

“Tea is undervalued,” Zahra said. “If we’re paying for, you know, a hundred tea bags for something like 2.99. I mean, it doesn’t it doesn’t make any sense.”

Supermarkets use tea as a loss leader. That creates a false floor on price which consumers have come to treat as normal. No individual brand programme changes that.

“I think it goes back to power,” she said. “The the growers don’t have enough power. They can’t demand. They don’t have the voice.”

“The question really for brands like us is, do we need, certification in order to access the market, or are we willing to find a different way to support farmers?” That question, she noted, has never really been put to the industry as a whole. It has mostly been taken for granted that certification would answer the problems. The problems are still there.

Closing

Asked what she would change about the commercial world, Zahra’s answer was simple.

“I would change how we value what is grown.”

“where there’s prosperity, everyone should prosper,” she said.

One tea company is trying to act on that. The system it operates inside has not changed.

Article discussed: “Who Pays for the Seal: Kenya Tea, Certification Cost and the Grower Who Absorbs It” Global Risk and Regeneration Institute, 11 September 2026.

The Green Contest Nobody Called a Contest

China is the world’s largest carbon emitter. It is also the world’s largest producer of solar panels, electric vehicles, and battery storage. Those facts are not in contradiction. From a Chinese cultural and political perspective, they are entirely consistent.

The article under discussion, A Green World Order with Chinese Characteristics, makes the structure visible. Climate action has drifted from shared mission into a contest over green technology dominance and global influence. China is not in the green transition as a liberal environmentalist.

It is in it as a long-term strategic actor whose national development goals happen, at this moment, to align with low-carbon technology leadership.

Western climate frameworks have not accounted for that distinction. Paul Gladston argues the reason is cultural, and that the tools to address it are largely absent from commercial and policy analysis.

Pocket Money on Art Books, Then Thirty Years in the Sinosphere

Paul came to Chinese culture through art, and to art through remainder bookshops as a child in Britain.

“I used to spend my pocket money on art books,” he said.

When the University of Nottingham invited him to help establish its campus in Ningbo in 2005, he agreed on one condition: he wanted to pursue research. What was planned as two articles became eleven books. He is now the Judith Nielsen Chair Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales Sydney. His work sits at the boundary between Western and Chinese-speaking cultural frameworks. That boundary, he argues, is precisely where climate analysis keeps failing.

The Variable the Article Leaves Out

The article is, Paul says, “typical of academic discourse.” Socio-economic and political analysis. Valuable, but incomplete.

“I often think that in order to decode some aspects of that discussion and give a richer view of that, one has to address culture. Leaving it out rather limits the discussion.”

The cultural variable is not soft context. It concerns what international commitment actually means to different parties, what timescales legitimate decision-making operates on, and what the relationship between state, society, and national interest looks like from inside a different tradition.

Confucian Pragmatism and the Long Game

China’s climate engagement, Paul argues, is shaped by a specific cultural inheritance. Confucianism was always a pragmatic idealism. It rejected the legalist view that human nature was bad and required punishment, and instead believed in the perfectibility of the individual and of society. Progress required pragmatism, not purity.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party has incorporated its own version of that tradition, including appeals to social harmony, as a framework for managing forty years of rapid and disruptive transformation. The result is a governing culture with a long-term orientation and a willingness to pursue steps that look inconsistent with the stated goal, if those steps serve the broader trajectory.

“It’s an acceptance from a Chinese perspective that we might have to do certain things that are at odds with the ultimate outcome that we’re trying to achieve. But we have a long-term view and we’ll do whatever it takes to get there.”

From a Western liberal perspective, that looks like bad faith. From inside the framework, it is rational.

Two Frameworks at the Same Negotiating Table

Western climate frameworks assume shared liberal values: transparency, democratic accountability, and international obligation as binding regardless of domestic politics. Those assumptions are not universal.

Paul is careful here. “We should not simply dress China up as some perfect exemplar of how to develop a green society.”

His point is not that China’s approach is superior. It is that the global climate debate “remains westernised.” The cultural frameworks of other major actors are not adequately represented in how cooperation is designed or evaluated.

The Missing Instrument

Paul’s magic wand is a cultural one. More people, in commercial and policy life, capable of sophisticated transcultural interpretation. Not relativism. Rigorous, informed reading of how different societies understand commitment, progress, and long-term action.

“What ought to change is to have more people that can give a sophisticated interpretation of issues that draw on culture, and particularly transcultural issues.”

The green world order is being constructed now. The cultural literacy required to build it on shared rather than assumed foundations is, for the moment, in short supply.

The Green Transition Needs More Mining. The Governance Has Not Kept Up.

The energy transition has a materials problem. Wind turbines, electric vehicles, and grid-scale batteries require cobalt, lithium, nickel, and copper extracted from the ground. The demand trajectory is steep.

And the governance architecture sitting between the mine and the finished product is, in most supply chains, structurally incomplete.

Two initiatives attracting attention in 2025, CDOP and the Science Based Targets initiative, represent attempts to give carbon accountability sharper teeth. The question this episode of The Responsible Edge presses underneath them is whether frameworks, however well-designed, produce change when the people making day-to-day sourcing decisions are appraised on cost, quality, and timeliness, and nothing else.

From a Tobacco Lobbying Firm to Field Work in Over a Hundred Countries

J.J. Messner was expected to become a lawyer in Australia. He started down that road. An early position at a corporate antitrust firm with a sideline in tobacco lobbying settled the question quickly. It was not the right road.

He moved into the security and stability space, eventually joining the Fund for Peace, where he directed the Fragile States Index, an annual assessment of social, economic, and governance indicators across 178 countries, and led field assessments in the oil, mining, hydroelectric, and agribusiness sectors across more than a hundred countries. From there he moved to Microsoft, building and leading its responsible sourcing programme for minerals integrity, before joining IRMA, where he now leads downstream purchaser engagement from Mauritius.

The through-line is consistent. JJ has spent two decades in the space between what companies commit to and what actually happens at the extractive end of their supply chains.

One Hundred and Three Mines, Fifty-Three Minerals, and a Very Long Supply Chain

IRMA is a multi-stakeholder mining standard with 103 mining companies currently in its system spanning 53 minerals. Most entered at the request of downstream purchasers: the automotive, consumer electronics, and renewable energy companies whose products depend on minerals they do not directly source.

That indirection is the structural problem. A company making laptops does not buy cobalt from a mine. It buys components from a tier one supplier, which buys from a smelter, which sources from a trader, which sources from a mine. The due diligence obligation sits at one end. The operational reality sits at the other.

“The thing about supply chains is they’re long and complex. For many of the companies that we work with, most of them indirectly source these raw materials.”

Excluding Risky Suppliers Moves the Problem. It Does Not Solve It.

The conventional response to supply chain risk is exclusion. If a supplier presents reputational or legal risk, remove them quickly. JJ’s critique is direct.

“They just then become somebody else’s problem and the issue doesn’t go away.”

Supply chains are not siloed. A mine serving one electronics company is probably serving several others. Exclusion displaces the risk without reducing it. His alternative is supplier capacity investment: working with suppliers to bring them into conformance rather than cutting them out. The financial case is not immediate.

But the ecosystem logic is hard to dismiss. Your problem is my problem. My problem is your problem.

The Sourcing Engineer Nobody Asked About Scope Three

The most precise observation in the episode is also the most uncomfortable. JJ asks what sourcing engineers are actually appraised on. The answer is cost, quality, and timeliness. Not Scope 3 emissions. Not legal exposure from high-risk sourcing locations. Not human rights due diligence.

“You’re looking at people who have the responsibility without the accountability and people who have the accountability without the responsibility. Not particularly well joined up thinking.”

Until the metrics used to evaluate daily sourcing decisions include the full range of material risks, responsible sourcing frameworks will sit adjacent to operations rather than inside them. JJ draws an analogy to occupational health and safety, which shifted from bolt-on obligation to core business function over several decades. The difference is that the health and safety shift was driven partly by liability landing directly on the decision-makers. That liability structure, in responsible sourcing, does not yet exist in the same form.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

The episode’s deepest tension is ecological. Decarbonisation requires minerals that require mining. Recycling currently recovers perhaps ten percent of the minerals in circulation. The gap will not close through circularity alone.

“You’re still going to have to mine. How do we make sure that society is having its needs met but we’re not disadvantaging those who are being impacted?”

Whether the governance frameworks being built today can reach far enough down the supply chain, and change the right incentive structures, before the extraction volumes required by net zero arrive in full is, as of now, genuinely open.

A Function Under Pressure

The sustainability function inside most organisations is, by now, well established on paper. The titles exist. The reporting cycles run. The frameworks multiply.

What is less visible is the person doing the work.

ESG reporting has expanded substantially over the past decade. So has the expectation that a sustainability professional, often working alone or in a small team, will cover Scope 1 through 3 emissions accounting, CSRD compliance, SBTi alignment, stakeholder engagement, product design review, and internal training. Simultaneously.

What gets lost in that accumulation is harder to measure than a carbon inventory. It is the capacity to think.

Formation and Origins

Kelsey Parsons grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. Her route into sustainability was not straightforwardly professional. She describes a childhood shaped by proximity to nature. “You have to protect what you’ve got around you,” she said.

A love of place preceded the career.

She studied geography and international relations at the University of Plymouth, then completed a master’s in global development and environment at the University of Bristol. Early roles included a media internship focused on climate communication and a student union environment officer position.

She entered corporate sustainability through Gunnebo Entrance Control, serving as sustainability officer and then global sustainability officer across approximately two years. She now consults independently through Weaving Green, working across climate strategy, carbon accounting, and sustainability training.

Kelsey describes her orientation as holistic. “I don’t like to focus just on the environment,” she said.

“I like to know how it’s interconnected into profit and purpose and people.”

That framing has shaped how she reads the condition of the professionals she now advises.

The Pattern Nobody Documents

The pattern Kelsey observed inside organisations was consistent. Every in-house sustainability professional, regardless of seniority or stated ambition, eventually ends up doing the same thing.

“Every in-house sustainability person ends up working on some level of reporting,” she said.

The degree varies. The gravitational pull does not.

What the reporting burden produces, over time, is a workforce that is technically busy and strategically constrained. The frameworks expand. The checklists lengthen. The people filling them in are often the same people who were hired to change something.

Kelsey does not frame this as organisational malice. She frames it as structural drift.

Reporting mechanisms created to impose accountability have, in many cases, displaced the work they were designed to support.

The result is what she calls the “alphabet salad situation.” A proliferation of frameworks, each with legitimate origins, creating collectively a compliance burden that consumes more than it produces.

The people carrying that burden are increasingly fatigued. And when they leave, or are cut, the frameworks remain.

The Work Today

Kelsey now operates across two distinct practices. Through Weaving Green, she advises organisations on climate strategy and carbon accounting. From April 2026, she has also joined Port of Tyne as Innovation Manager for Energy and Sustainability, focusing on alternative fuels, shore power, and infrastructure readiness in the maritime sector.

Her consulting work has shifted substantially toward training: preparing people within organisations to speak about sustainability clearly and credibly. This is partly a communication problem. It is also a governance problem.

If the people closest to the data cannot explain what it means to the people making decisions, the data does not move anything.

Her Caribbean background informs how she reads different markets. Corporate sustainability in the Caribbean remains at an earlier stage than Europe or North America.

Organisations there are, in her characterisation, “still on the community engagement, sort of planting trees side of things.”

Governments are, in some cases, moving faster than the private sector. She cites Barbados as an example of accelerated energy transition.

The gap between governmental ambition and corporate practice is, she suggests, familiar terrain. She has seen a version of it in Europe too.

What Remains Unresolved

The episode’s underlying question is whether the reporting architecture currently in place is producing anything beyond compliance. Kelsey’s position is careful. She does not dismiss reporting. She argues it will, and should, narrow.

“Reporting will scale down,” she said, “in the sense of we’re not going to ask everything under the sun anymore. We’re going to ask what we need to ask.”

Her expectation is that leaner, more targeted disclosure will eventually feed innovation rather than obstruct it. The data will become credible enough to justify investment decisions.

That is a conditional argument. It depends on reporting becoming better, not merely less. It depends on organisations retaining the people who understand what the data means. And it depends on those people being given something to do with it beyond filling in the next disclosure requirement.

None of those conditions are guaranteed.

The ESG backlash has, in some organisations, accelerated the disposal of sustainability functions. Kelsey observes that organisations that cut their teams have ended up on a different trajectory from those that kept them. The differentiating factor, she suggests, is not regulatory pressure. It is customer behaviour.

The younger consumer cohort is purchasing differently. Whether that demographic shift moves fast enough to offset near-term cost pressure is an open question.

A Terminological Proposal

Kelsey’s suggested reform is a linguistic one, and it is more precise than it sounds. She would rename sustainability departments as value-making departments.

“I will scrap sustainability as a word and probably put in value-maker, change-maker, something like that instead.”

The argument is that language shapes what a board hears. A value-making department is, by definition, doing something a chief executive already cares about. A sustainability department is, in many organisations, still heard as the department that handles the thing that used to be called CSR.

Whether renaming a function changes what it is asked to do is genuinely uncertain. The structural incentives do not disappear with the title change. The reporting requirements continue regardless of what the team is called.

What Kelsey is pointing at is a positioning problem. Sustainability, as currently framed in most organisations, sits adjacent to strategy. Her proposition is that it should sit inside it.

The distance between those two positions is not just semantic. It determines whether the people doing the work are consumed by compliance or empowered to change something.

A system optimised for exit, not longevity

In the UK office market, furniture decisions are tied to lease events, not asset life.

At lease end, companies relocate. Fit-outs are replaced. Furniture is written off. Around 300 tonnes go to landfill each working day. Another 200 tonnes go to recycling. Much of it remains high quality.

This is not a failure of materials. It is a failure of alignment.

The entity specifying the furniture does not own it long enough to bear the downstream cost. Procurement cycles reward speed, aesthetics, and compliance with current design trends. Residual value is rarely considered.

Responsibility ends at exit.

Formation inside a mispriced decision

Dr Greg Lavery traces this misalignment back to his early engineering work.

In 1994, he was designing waste infrastructure for a coal-fired power station. The plant was expected to operate for 50 years. The waste system was scoped for seven.

The reason was not technical. Ownership would change. Liability would transfer.

“They won’t own the power station after seven years.” Greg’s response was immediate. “That’s not the right answer.”

The decision exposed a structural gap. Design decisions were being made on a shorter horizon than the asset’s impact.

Greg moved from engineering into strategy to understand how those decisions were made, and how they might be changed.

The same logic, scaled across furniture

A decade ago, Greg encountered the same pattern in office interiors.

Furniture followed a predictable path:

• Procured new at the start of a lease
• Used for a fixed term
• Disposed of at exit

The system ignored embedded carbon, material scarcity, and cumulative cost.

The supply chain amplified the inefficiency. Raw materials sourced globally. Processed across multiple countries. Margins added at each stage. Then discarded after a single use cycle.

“It’s incredibly wasteful.”

The issue was not lack of alternatives. It was that the default option remained easier.

Replacing new demand, not just extending old supply

Through Rype Office, Greg focuses on displacing new furniture demand rather than servicing the secondhand market.

The distinction is operational.

Secondhand markets serve a small segment willing to accept visible wear. Greg targets the majority that expects “as new” performance and appearance.

This requires remanufacturing, not reuse.

The process includes:

• Material-level restoration, including non-toxic scratch removal and re-finishing
• Reupholstery and recolouring to meet current design specifications
• Integration of multiple supply streams into a single coherent design

Typical project composition:

• ~40% client’s existing assets, remanufactured
• ~40% externally sourced assets, remanufactured
• ~10–20% new items

The outcome is indistinguishable from new.

“If someone can tell the difference… then we’ve failed.”

Cost is typically around 20% lower than wholesale new. Environmental footprint is reduced by roughly 80%. Waste is similarly avoided.

The constraint is not performance. It is market behaviour.

Where incentives block substitution

The furniture industry is structurally linear.

Manufacturers are configured around centralised production. Revenue depends on selling new units.

Design cycles reinforce this. Annual colour trends and aesthetic shifts create artificial obsolescence.

Greg describes this as a form of “fast fashion” applied to interiors.

Sales incentives reinforce it.

“If your bonus… depended on selling more new stuff, of course you’re incentivised to sell more new stuff.”

Remanufacturing introduces friction into this model. It reduces volume demand. It decentralises production. It shifts value from manufacturing to service and operations.

As a result, incumbents have limited incentive to promote it.

Policy begins to intervene at scale

The UK government is attempting to shift this dynamic through procurement.

Greg is part of a taskforce designing the Circular Economy Growth Plan. The focus is not theory but implementation across sectors including the built environment.

One mechanism is purchasing standards.

Government contracts are being structured to require circular outcomes. In one case, suppliers must provide IT equipment without purchasing new devices.

This creates immediate demand for remanufactured supply. It also signals quality thresholds to the wider market.

The scale matters. Government spending exceeds £200 billion annually.

Procurement becomes a lever to reshape supply chains.

The behavioural constraint

Despite cost savings and performance parity, adoption remains inconsistent.

Greg attributes this to perception and awareness.

The term “secondhand” carries negative associations. Buyers expect visible compromise.

This creates a signalling problem. Even when outcomes are equivalent, expectations are not.

Greg recalls a project where users assumed a fully remanufactured office was new. “That’s a win.”

The challenge is scaling that outcome without requiring direct exposure each time.

The unresolved dependency

Circular models reduce reliance on global supply chains. They create local employment. They lower cost and emissions.

But they depend on three conditions:

• Sufficient supply of recoverable assets
• Operational capability to remanufacture at scale
• Willingness from buyers to specify non-new solutions

The first two are technical. The third is behavioural.

Greg places responsibility on decision-makers inside organisations. “I wonder if there’s a circular solution to this.”

Until that question is routinely asked, the system defaults to replacement.

No natural endpoint

The circular model does not resolve the system. It competes with it.

Linear incentives remain embedded in manufacturing, design, and procurement.

Policy can shift demand. Technology can improve quality.

But ownership cycles still define responsibility.

The same question persists from Greg’s early career: Who designs for consequences that occur after exit?

​Scene and Context

The UK presents itself as a climate leader. Territorial emissions are falling. Targets are being met. Progress appears measurable and controlled.

Sarah does not dispute the reductions. What she questions is what those numbers omit.

Current UK climate targets focus on emissions produced within national borders. They do not account for emissions embedded in imported goods. As manufacturing moves overseas, emissions fall at home while consumption remains constant.

“It’s not just an impact to our emissions,” Sarah says. “It’s an impact to our jobs.”

Behind the national figures sit factory closures, shrinking workforces, and growing reliance on imports produced under weaker environmental standards.

Formation and Origins

Sarah trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London. She grew up in a farming family, where land, work, and income were tightly connected.

At thirteen, she lost her father to suicide after a farming contract collapsed.

“That understanding that life is fragile,” she says, “also that the work we do really should matter.”

In her early twenties, Sarah and her husband left London for the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain. They lived off grid, homeschooled their children, and worked with natural materials including clay and lime.

“It was unconventional,” she says. “But it taught me resilience, creativity and the importance of thinking outside of the box.”

The experience reshaped how she understood systems, limits, and responsibility.

A Turning Point

Returning to the UK, Sarah moved into roles that connected architecture, manufacturing, and industry advocacy. She worked at the Brick Development Association, representing clay manufacturers across the UK and Ireland, before joining Michelmersh Brick Holdings.

Today, Sarah is Group Innovation and Sustainability Director, with responsibility extending across innovation, sustainability, marketing, technical strategy, product development, and procurement.

“I’m very busy,” she says.

Michelmersh is the fourth largest brickmaker in the UK, producing clay bricks, pavers, architectural terracotta, and prefabricated masonry products. Its work appears on Battersea Power Station, the British Library, the V&A, and Harrods.

But size does not protect an industry from structural pressure.

The Work Being Done Now

Since 2016, Michelmersh has reduced its emissions intensity by just over ten percent per tonne of product. Across the UK ceramics sector, absolute scope 1 and 2 emissions have fallen by more than fifty percent since the early 2000s.

Sarah is precise about what that reduction represents.

“Twenty-four percent reduction is the intensity reduction per tonne of product,” she says. “The remainder is totally attributable to closures of factories.”

Decarbonisation has occurred. But so has de-industrialisation.

The sector now employs around 17,500 people. Around forty percent of manufacturing sites have closed since the turn of the century. Imports from non-EU countries continue to rise.

During the energy crisis following the war in Ukraine, some manufacturers experienced energy price increases of “seven to eight hundred percent”.

“That is just going to break most businesses,” Sarah says.

The Tension Inside Climate Policy

Sarah’s concern is not climate ambition. It is how progress is measured.

The UK reports territorial emissions under the Paris Agreement. Consumption-based emissions remain largely invisible in public reporting.

“We are effectively offshoring manufacturing products to other countries,” she says. “But we’re still consuming those products.”

The result, in her view, is misleading.

“We’re kind of greenwashing all of the people of the UK into believing that we’ve reduced our emissions,” Sarah says. “Which is not the case.”

The effects reach beyond carbon.

“We’re losing skills in this country,” she says. “And we’re also beholden to other countries.”

Closing Reflection

Sarah does not argue for retreat. She argues for clarity and pace.

“We are decarbonising all of these industries,” she says. “But we’re not doing it at a pace that can keep these industries alive.”

Her focus remains practical. Reduce energy use first. Improve data. Optimise processes. Build circularity incrementally.

Asked what she would change if she could alter one thing, her answer is not technical.

“I would change the culture of greed,” Sarah says.

It is not framed as ideology. It is an observation formed inside factories, supply chains, and balance sheets.