Kingspan cannot be immune to criticism of Formula 1 ‘green laundering’ deal

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It’s a far cry from the pub courtyard in Kingscourt, Co Cavan, where Eugene Murtagh founded the Kingspan Group in 1965, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where the company’s glitzy new partnership with a Formula 1 team kicks off this weekend. -end – approximately 6,900 km to be more precise.

But the rapprochement with the Mercedes-AGM Petronas Formula 1 team, whose drivers include world champion Lewis Hamilton, is also light years away from being a good idea. What the hell was Kingspan thinking?

The company, now run by the founder’s son, Gene Murtagh, made a serious error in judgment by allowing itself to be dazzled by the bright lights and glamor of the traveling carbon carnival from motorsport to conspicuous consumption.

By agreeing to chair the Mercedes team’s image-focused ‘sustainability working group’, the Irish company has been aspired to help in the world’s most unnecessarily environmentally damaging sport’s greenwashing efforts. F1 cannot, with any credibility, be considered sustainable at any level, no matter how much money it invests in expensive PR campaigns.

It’s a shame because Kingspan, which is a world leader in the manufacture of insulation, is a true pioneer in a business field that has a positive and essential role to play in the fight against climate change. The design of materials for retrofitting old draughty buildings and airtightness of new ones will do much of the heavy lifting to meet emissions targets.

This is Kingspan’s strong point. Soiling yourself as a green fender for a sport beloved of carbon-soaked Middle Eastern diets is not.

Power brokers

F1 powerbrokers have long recognized that the climate change agenda poses an existential threat to the sport. It is much more exposed than most other international sports to changes in attitude towards unnecessary carbon consumption. She has pledged to achieve net zero carbon status by 2030. It’s laudable if this turns out to be true, but at this point seems hardly credible.

Much like F1 teams, soccer teams and their fans travel abroad regularly, expanding their global footprint and thus increasing associated emissions. But the optics of the two sports are incomparable. Soccer involves players kicking a bag of fresh air around a green field. It is a healthy thing to do. F1 involves nearly two dozen 1,050 horsepower cars running on high octane fuel for up to two hours on an asphalt track, doing about five miles per gallon.

It sounds like fun. But in 2021, as people worry the planet is burning, it also looks like an anachronism against a background of climate concern.

Cars are hardly a fraction of the problem with F1, however. According to a sustainability report commissioned last year by sports administrators, the carbon emissions of F1 scopes 1, 2 and 3 (direct, indirect and value chain) total more than 256,000 tonnes of CO2 for an average season.

Assuming this industry number isn’t a huge undershoot, that still equates to 61,000 more passenger cars on the road for a full year.

But only 0.7% of F1’s emissions come from the race cars themselves. About 45 percent comes from traveling the world for more than 20 races with all of the team’s cars, mechanical equipment, rubber tires and other items.

Another 27 percent comes from the gang’s transportation of team employees and attendants from corporate sponsors. DHL, the courier and sponsor of the sport, says it travels around 120,000 km per year moving its equipment for races. This is equivalent to going around the world three times.

The real environmental problem with F1 isn’t that it’s cars spitting out carbon when they race on a track. It is because the whole circus is continually raising sticks to travel around the world, including to developing countries like Brazil which are highly exposed to the impact of climate change.

Carbon fuel

Naturally, many races take place in states whose wealth rests exclusively on the sale of carbon fuel, some of which have also been accused of being at the heart of efforts to minimize the impact of climate change: Saudi Arabia, where Kingspan’s sponsorship kicks off the weekend; Abu Dhabi, the emirate bathed in oil; Bahrain, another major exporter of crude; and Azerbaijan, another autocracy fueled by oil and gas.

F1 has received applause from some for making genuine efforts to harness technological innovation to reduce the sport’s carbon footprint, it is said. By putting Kingspan’s name on its efforts to generate new ideas, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team can expect to receive more.

But sport’s true commitment to reducing its carbon footprint should be questioned.

If F1 takes climate change seriously, why does it keep expanding its calendar? The season ends this weekend in Saudi Arabia, whose government was at the center of efforts to water down statements at the recent Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow.

Next season, the F1 route hits a record 23 countries. Travel is the problem with F1 shows. If it was serious about tackling the problem, Carnival just needs to travel a little less. But F1 can’t help it.

F1’s commitment to sustainability is all bumf and bluster and selfish hot air. It’s not even in depth. This is why the decision of the Cavan Insulation Group to come on board as a business partner was such a surprise. His name has a real cachet in the world of sustainable practice.

What will Kingspan gain for its brand by joining a list of sport-wide business partners that includes Saudi Aramco and Malaysian gas giant Petronas?

Gene Murtagh gave a hint this week. He spoke of bringing Kingspan’s sustainability message to “an audience of 500 million Formula 1 fans”. It is not about helping an irreparably climate-carefree sport bring about positive change. This is a simple, numbers-driven corporate partnership to draw attention to the Kingspan logo and help an F1 team create a green pretext.

There is, of course, nothing inherently illegitimate in a business-oriented merger. So why not just put it that way? When the partnership is inflated as part of the effort to tackle climate change, it has to be called out for what it is: greenwashing, outright.

The smart people who run Kingspan should have known that.

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