Page 25 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

4 Cha pte r O n e

for shareholders. In other words, “the business of business should
be business.” It is certainly true that environmental initiatives do
not automatically produce financial benefits; they need to be eval-
uated in the same light as any other invest-
ments. However, it is also true that a full
WENEEDTORADICALLY
consideration of environmental factors and
REDESIGN INDUSTRIAL
trade-offs will reveal opportunities to simul-
SYSTEMS TO CREATE
taneously enhance customer satisfaction,
MORE VALUE WITH
profitability, and competitiveness. This will
FEWER RESOURCES.
be amply demonstrated in later chapters. In
the long run, businesses can only remain
competitive if they are attuned to the broader needs of society.
In the words of management theorists Michael Porter and Mark
Kramer [3]:
The mutual dependence of corporations and society implies
that both business decisions and social policies must follow
the principle of shared value… a company must integrate a
social perspective into the core frameworks it already uses to
understand competition and guide its business strategy.

The Hidden Mountain
The commitment of major corporations to environmental sustainabil-
ity is certainly a hopeful sign. Yet, even with widespread adoption of
corporate environmental responsibility, worldwide levels of energy
and material use continue to rise. Paradoxically, the more efficient
companies become in terms of resource utilization, the more rapidly
the global economy grows; this is known to economists as the “re -
bound effect.” It is becoming apparent that voluntary, incremental
environmental improvements by individual companies will be inad-
equate to significantly offset the growth of the global economy. The
rapid industrialization of China, India, and other emerging econo-
mies will likely exacerbate this problem. Ecological footprint analysis
suggests that humanity’s ecological demands already exceed what
nature can supply, and we are now eroding our “natural capital”
rather than living off the interest (see Chapter 9). Clearly, we need to
dig deeper into the source of the problem.
Few of us in the developed world are aware of the enormous
environmental impacts of our everyday lifestyles. As we pursue our
habitual patterns—mealtimes, commuting to work, occasional rec-
reation—we have no clue about the hidden flow of resources needed
to support these seemingly innocent activities. Each of us is actually
living on top of a mountain of resources, including energy and
materials, all of which originated from the natural environment.
Ecological goods and services are embedded in everything that we
consume (see Figure 1.1). It has been estimated that the average
American citizen accounts for about 30 metric tons of material per