Implementation Strategies
Two means of achieving eco-immunity come quickly to mind here. The first, of course, is recycling writ large, or what McDonough and Braungart call Cradle-to-Cradle thinking. In their view, the wastes of one product should become the input stream for another — waste is food. As the late Ray Anderson, former CEO of Interface, Inc., exclaimed in his rousing manifesto, Mid-Course Correction, “…if we get it right during the next industrial revolution, we will never have to take another drop of oil from the Earth for our products or industrial processes. That epitomizes my vision for Interface.”
GE, for its part, is also practicing eco-immunity in this way at its John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore, India — the company’s largest integrated, multidisciplinary research and development site of its kind. In response to high levels of water scarcity there, the GE site in Bangalore has become a “zero wastewater discharge facility that treats and utilizes [i.e., recycles] all wastewater generated on-site.” Its daily consumption of freshwater resources has declined by an average of 70,000 gallons a day as a result. Not only does this help immunize the company from local water scarcity, it also shields it from risks or liabilities associated with wastewater discharges and environmental contamination.
The second way of immunizing oneself from a dependency on natural resources is to constrain one’s addictions to only those resources that are in abundant and local supply, if only by choosing where to do business. In general, this will only be possible for resources that are renewable — solar energy, water, the climate system, other ecosystem services, etc. — albeit constrained by the limits of their local or global carrying capacities, as the case may be. The use of non-renewable resources, by contrast, should be eliminated entirely, except for their recycled use, of course, which takes us back to the first approach: recycling writ large.
A good illustration of this second, location-based approach to achieving eco-immunity can be found here in northern New England — once again involving water — but this time for the opposite reason. Water in northern New England is in abundant supply. Indeed, in some of our own studies where a company’s use of water in Vermont, for example, was compared to conservative allocations of available renewable supplies, the ratios we found were striking. One such company, the Agri-Mark dairy cooperative, a regional food manufacturer known for its Cabot brand of dairy products, uses less than one percent of water allocable to its facilities, after all other ecological, human residential and business needs in the vicinities of its creameries have been fully met. For all intents and purposes, Agri-Mark/Cabot is immune to water risks — at least for now.
Eco-immunity also has measurement implications. Along with the exodus of the eco-efficiency doctrine should go the metrics that came with it, namely the whole class of so-called relative and intensity metrics so commonly used today. And in their place with the arrival of the eco-immunity doctrine should come a new class of metrics, now commonly referred to as context-based metrics. Unlike relative and intensity metrics, context-based metrics take ecological limits explicitly into account, and thereby address the risks associated with natural resource use in ways that relative or intensity metrics do not. Who cares what the efficiency of a company’s use of water is if the aquifer it relies on is drying up?
Strange Bedfellows
The irony of the eco-immunity doctrine is that it is not an environmental sustainability doctrine at all, and yet it largely ends up in the same place as if it was. It is predicated, that is, on the goal of protecting a business and preserving its profits, and yet it also constitutes a powerful strategy for improving the sustainability performance of an organization. And it does so, as well, in ways that the eco-efficiency doctrine can’t possibly match. One doctrine (eco-immunity) says eliminate natural resource use as fully as possible; the other (eco-efficiency) says use as many natural resources as you like, just do so efficiently.
It should also be clear that the principle of eco-immunity applies not only to risks associated with impacts and dependencies on natural capital, but also to impacts and dependencies on other forms of capital: human, social, and constructed (or built). Here the risks earlier described as having to do with resource limitations and liabilities are applicable as well, but differ by type of capital. Most of the risks associated with impacts on human and social capital, for example, arguably apply to legal liabilities, not shortages.
When broadly applied to capital impacts of all kinds, then, the eco-immunity doctrine might be better described as simply capital immunity, a general strategy for insulating organizations from risks associated with their impacts and dependencies on capitals of all kinds, and which also leads to superior sustainability performance — all in the service of maximizing profits, no less. Who would have thought such a thing was even possible!
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Mark W. McElroy, Ph.D. is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable Organizations and the original developer of the Context-Based Sustainability method.
Published Sep 17, 2013 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT / 8pm BST / 9pm CEST