News roundup: Food workers, coal emissions, used clothing and PepsiCo potatoes

Food workers are most exploited workforce

Source: Business and Human Rights Centre

Farmers to protect PepsiCo’s potato supply

Source: AgNavigator

PepsiCo is one of the largest potato buyers in the world and is relying on farmers sharing practical experience to protect its supply from drought, water shortages, rising input costs and erratic weather.

PepsiCo sets regenerative agriculture target outcomes, such as healthier soil and more efficient use of water and nutrients, but lets farmers work out how to reach them. The company does not buy equipment for growers, but says it discusses costs, investment needs and pricing with them so they can afford to invest in resilience.

The company works with around 300,000 farmers across its agricultural supply chains. It recently brought more than 140 growers, suppliers and agronomists from over 35 countries to its Global Agro University in Hannover, Germany.

Alongside the global event, PepsiCo runs demonstration farms, study tours and smaller regional meetings, as well as a digital knowledge platform for growers that now uses AI. In one recent exchange, growers and agronomists from China travelled to the US to learn about bed planting, which can improve water and nutrient efficiency but depends on the right soil and changes to machinery. The company also uses a Climate Resilience Platform to project how climate change will affect specific growing regions up to the end of the decade.

Used apparel export coalition

Source: Circle Economy

Adidas, BESTSELLER, H&M Group and Inditex have joined the Or Foundation to launch the Apparel Recovery Coalition (ARC), with Circle Economy acting as secretariat. The coalition will explore how producer responsibility schemes, where brands pay towards managing their products at end of life, could fund reuse, repair, recycling and waste management in countries that receive large volumes of exported second-hand clothing. According to the European Environment Agency, around 1.4 million tonnes of used textiles leave the EU each year, mostly for Africa and Asia. 

ARC was launched at Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, which the Or Foundation estimates recirculates 25 million garments a month and supports tens of thousands of livelihoods. Its first demonstration project will run there, and will explore how best to enhance Ghana’s existing circular textile ecosystem. It will also include initiatives to strengthen the local infrastructure, promote environmental remediation, and implement education programmes. Over the next two years, the coalition plans to build and test a producer responsibility blueprint, add a second recipient country and use the results to inform key stakeholders involved with post-consumer textile waste including brands, policymakers, and producer responsibility organisations with the end-goal of strengthening a global post-consumer textile management system. 

Some commentators have highlighted concerns about how waste is being defined. A widely cited figure, that 40% of clothing entering Kantamanto leaves as waste, comes from a 2019 master’s thesis by one of The Or Foundation’s co-founders. Critics argue this measures garments traders cannot sell at a profit, which is different from clothing that is damaged or unwearable. Separate research covering 244,500 second-hand garments in Uganda and Tanzania, found around 96% were rewearable and just over 1% counted as textile waste. 

Some commentators have also questioned whether the organisations defining the problem should be designing the policy response and generating the evidence behind it. They are calling on ARC to publish its definitions, baseline data and methodology, and to have them independently verified, so that efforts to tackle waste do not undermine a market built on reuse. 

Australian court blocks coal mine approval 

Source: Reuters

Australia’s high court has ruled in favour of a grassroots community group over a coal mining company in the first climate case to reach the country’s highest court. By a three to two majority, the court dismissed an appeal by MACH Energy, owner of the Mount Pleasant coal mine in New South Wales’s Hunter Valley. It confirmed that the state’s planning commission should have considered how to minimise the emissions released when the mine’s exported coal is burned overseas. 

MACH Energy, a subsidiary of Indonesia’s Salim Group, planned to double the mine’s output to 21 million tonnes a year and extend its life to 2048. That would generate around 870 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, roughly twice Australia’s total annual emissions, with 98% coming from coal burned abroad. These downstream, or Scope 3, emissions are not counted in Australia’s national greenhouse gas inventory. 

The case was brought by the Denman Aberdeen Muswellbrook Scone Healthy Environment Group, led by two retired science teachers who live next to the mine. They argued that emissions from exported coal drive bushfires, drought, flooding and extreme heat in the Hunter Valley. Scientific interveners, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the court that each tonne of carbon dioxide adds roughly the same amount of heat to the climate, wherever it is released. The ruling upholds the principle that planning authorities must consider the chain from a project’s emissions to local climate harm,  and finds that other countries accounting for those emissions under the Paris Agreement does not remove that obligation. 

The expansion’s approval remains invalid and must be reassessed, although the mine can keep operating until the end of 2032 under a separate permit. The ruling applies directly in New South Wales, where 17 coal projects are in the planning pipeline, and legal experts expect courts across Australia to take note. It follows the International Court of Justice’s 2025 advisory opinion that fossil fuel-exporting states bear responsibility for climate harm from their exports.