Sustainability

What does this Buzzword actually means?

Photo by American Public Power Association on unsplash.com

In our last post, we explained how the implementation of sustainability into our economy could look like: recycling and a Circular Economy make us less dependent on raw materials.

But let’s take a closer look at the term sustainability, as people seem to have different things in mind when they use it.

In Germany the term ‘Nachhaltigkeit’, the translation of sustainability, has been used in forestry since 1713. There it means “never harvest more than the forest can naturally regrow”

In 1987, this old concept was adopted by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development in order to find a balance between the desire for a better life and limited natural resources. The solution was found to be sustainable development, a “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
This report, now known as the Brundtland Report, popularized and defined sustainable development.

Since then, the meaning of the concept has branched into two main trends:

One of them understands sustainability as the harmony between the economic, environmental and social dimensions (this 3-legged model is inspired by John Elkington’s Triple Bottom Line concept):
Next to profit and caring for the planet, the people play a major role in this approach. Good human working conditions is one of the aspects in this interpretation of sustainability.

The relationship between the three elements is depicted in the following diagram, showing how economic and social growth is restricted by the boundaries of the environment.

The other branch is more complex and concerned about sustainability in terms of which resources are provided to the next generations.

This concept differentiates materials as natural vs. man-made resources as renewable vs. non-renewable.

Scenarios can then be analyzed in terms of weak or strong sustainability: future generations should not have less wealth than previous ones. In weak sustainability, it is acceptable for natural resources to be converted into man-made resources, while strong sustainability does not agree that man-made resources can replace natural ones.

Source: https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8708C8C/download

As you can see, sustainability is a fuzzy concept. Some sides emphasize the humans in an environmentally-friendly profit-driven system, while other sides argue that we can deplenish natural resources, as long as the man-made resources we build from it are worth the trade.

So what does it mean when a company says it cares about sustainability? It can mean anything from “any natural resource we use, we leave more plentiful than we found it”, to “We think saying this will make you buy more of our products”

At Reccoon, being sustainable means trying to make the best of the waste people throw out.
This means getting the waste to the right recycling station, but it also means helping people sort their trash better, and in the best case — produce less trash overall.

Here are some further reading which might be interesting:

• Measuring and Evaluating Sustainability: Ethics in Sustainability Indexes — Sarah E. Fredericks
• Urban Transition Labs: co-creating transformative action for sustainable cities — Frank Nevens, Niki Frantzeskaki, Leen Gorissen, Derk Loorbach
• Weak Versus Strong Sustainability: Exploring the Limits of Two Opposing Paradigms — Eric Neumayer