Sustainability

Sustainability is the idea of maintaining the current status of a system or process in its existing status. In old days, human population was small compared to the natural resources available, also their needs where humble and limited, so the treated the natural resources for granted. They thought that natural resources are unlimited resources that will keep renewing itself and they will never feel in shortage, till one day they noticed that the already have consumed two third of the planet resources and if they keep moving in their industrial direction, these resources will vanish and their children and grandchildren will suffer their parents and grandparents actions.

The previous way, multinational organizations was using natural resources, was leading the whole planet to extinction, problems like climate change, rising of sea level, fresh water shortage, pollution levels is hitting the roof in some of top industrial cities around the world. This foolish consumption will not affect humans only but all creatures in our planet.

So a new model for industry was required, a model that takes environment and future into consideration, a model that doesn’t care only about profit and producing more but also cares whether resources were used efficiently during the production, how we are affecting the environment and how our products will be disposed. So instead of the regular model from “from cradle to grave” a new model was introduce, “from cradle to cradle”, which cares about how the product will be manufactured with the least resources ever and how they can recycled at least once after their initial use.

Now, some big organizations like Nike are encouraging customer to donate their old shoes so they can be re-used again in industry or for some other charity form, Nike designer went back to the first principles again, trying to make new shoes as recyclable as possible. And the result, they made shoes generate 63% less waste in manufacturing than a typical Nike design.  The use of solvents has been cut by 80%.  And a stunning 37% less energy is required to create a pair of shoes. More and More cloth companies are adopting such way of thinking, and in the near future, Puma says, it will produce a new line of T-shirts and sneakers that can be ripped up and buried in the ground as fertilizer.

One of the other big organizations that is taking sustainability seriously is Coca-Cola company, Coca-Cola is working together with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and is targeting some serious sustainable goals to achieve before 2020, the company is committed to focus on sustainable management of water, energy, and packaging use as well as sustainable sourcing of agricultural ingredients. Some of there detailed goals are, improving water efficiency by 25%, reducing CO2 emissions embedded in ‘the drink in your hand’ by 25%, reaching a 75% recovery rate of bottles and cans in developed markets.

As you can see big organization started to take responsibility for their actions, they know that if they didn’t start paying more attention to the environment right now, they will be losing money in the future and it will be late to react to the problem.