My first job out of college was as an environmental consultant in Silicon
Valley. This was the 1980s and a time before “sustainability” had emerged as a
business
imperative.
Our approach to environmental sustainability was called “remediation,” which
may sound sophisticated, but in truth was technical janitorial work. We would go
to contaminated industrial sites and try to find ways to limit the spread of
pollution that had gotten into the air, soil and water.
After about a year or so, I became pretty disillusioned with remediation. That’s
because trying to clean up a contaminated industrial site is like trying to put
toothpaste back into a tube. You can never get it all back in, and that’s
especially a problem with industrial chemicals, because many are highly toxic
and at low concentrations; we were working at the
parts-per-million/parts-per-billion level, which is the equivalent of an
eye-dropper’s worth of chemical in a swimming pool. You don’t have to be a
genius to recognize that we should be putting as much effort into preventing the
problem in the first place as cleaning up our past
mistakes.
Along with remediation, what we needed to be doing was “premediation” —
engineering future sustainability issues out of product and production process
in the first place through smart
design.
That said, remediation has had some successes — we’ve gotten pretty good at
capturing
pollution
before it gets out in the environment; billowing smoke stacks are an
increasingly rare sight. But we are merely treating the symptoms, because the
pollution hasn’t gone away. We still have to put thee captured waste into
barrels and truck it off to a landfill somewhere, and hope that it doesn’t end
up as the next remediation site.
But there are many problems that remediation can never solve. For example, you
can’t remediate an extinct species, an acidified ocean, or a climate that’s
pushed beyond its critical tipping point. And you can’t remediate industrial
chemicals that bio-accumulate in the tissue of every living mammal and find
their highest concentration at the top of the food chain in human breast milk.
Those problems are not going to be solved by remediation. We have to admit that
our current model’s broken and that we need a new one.
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Now, we’re fortunate because we have a perfect model of sustainable
manufacturing that produces huge volumes of very sophisticated products —
everything from high-tech ceramics to portable, cranial supercomputers. It’s
constantly innovating and improving the performance of those products and does
so in a way that never jeopardizes the livability of the planet. That model is
the Earth’s biosphere. And what’s really important to remember is that the
biosphere is the only model of a sustainable production system that we have. We
have no other place we can look to learn how to manufacture and operate
sustainably on this planet.
Luckily, this means we know exactly what sustainability is. It’s not a journey,
as many executives like to claim — it is a clear destination. Human
post-industrial sustainability is going to look like nature; and you can see
what that means by looking out your window. Nature operates on a parsimonious
materials palette, built from a small handful of elemental materials that make
up everything you see. These materials are stored temporarily in nature’s
products — trees, frogs, camels — awaiting the next turn of the cycle to be
reincarnated into the next tree, frog or camel. Products are built additively,
from the bottom up; and the power source is captured solar energy, stored
biochemically in the products themselves. The ever-innovating system continually
improves the products, storing the increasingly refined design information in
genes that are spread globally in the cells of all organisms.
The premise of this article series is to decipher the principles that account
for the sustainability of the biosphere, translate them for business and embed
them in corporate DNA. By doing so, sustainability will disappear as a
management concern. Once the “Biosphere Rules” are fully adopted by business
you, in effect, foolproof sustainability.
That’s not hyperbole. Look at nature. Does a snail get up in the morning and
say, “How can I be sustainable today?” Of course not — it doesn’t have to.
Sustainability is already programmed into every living thing on the planet. And
when that happens for business, managers won’t have to think about
sustainability when they wake up, either. They can go back to focusing on
traditional business concerns like outdoing the competition, enhancing
profitability and thrilling customers. Sustainability will take care of itself.
Dr. Gregory C. Unruh is the Sustainability Editor for the MIT Sloan Management
Review and author of the new book, The Biosphere Rules: Nature’s Five
Circularity Secrets for Sustainable Profits. For a limited time, Sustainable
Brands subscribers can download a complimentary digital copy of the book
here.
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Sustainability Editor
MIT Sloan
Dr. Gregory C. Unruh is the Arison Professor of Values Leadership at George Mason University in the Washington DC Metro area, and the Sustainability Editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review.
Published Oct 14, 2019 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST