Page 33 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

28 2. Sustainability, sustainable development, and business sustainability

employees all over the world (WBCSD, 2002). Companies have also a responsibility for
the safety, health, and environmental conditions of the places where they operate (KPMG
International, 2014). Moreover, according to Gray and Milne (2002), social disparities are a
congenital component of capitalism since they split the world into capitalists and workers.
According to Paul Polman (2015), Unilever’s former Chief Executive Officer (CEO), social
and environmental goals have been fixed by the 75% of the largest firms. However, although
corporate commitment to sustainable development has become mainstream in the last
decades, this has not effectively contributed to the reduction of the human environmental
footprint or of global social problems (Dyllick and Muff, 2015). On the contrary, these appear
to be exacerbated.
For all these reasons, the business sector is supposed to have a responsibility in the path
toward global sustainability. In 1992, the World Business Council for Sustainable Develop-
ment (WBCSD), a CEO-led organization of forward-thinking companies, was created to
represent the business voice at the Rio Earth Summit. According to its founder, Stephan
Schmidheiny, a Swiss entrepreneur and philanthropist, business has an unavoidable respon-
sibility in sustainable development (“WBCSD”, n.d.). Twenty-nine WBCSD members have
recently worked on Vision 2050, envisaging nine billion people living well and within
the limits of the planet (WBCSD, 2010, p. 4). They acknowledged the impossibility to reach
the vision with a business-as-usual attitude and the need to decouple economic growth from
resource depletion and environmental degradation through radical changes in governance,
economic frameworks, and business and human behaviors. A similar belief is also supported
by the Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences, which states that
industrial processes and resource management should be modified in order to bring about
Sustainable Development (Azapagic and Perdan, 2000).

2.3.1 Evolution of the concept

The previous section discussed the relevance of the Business Sustainability concept. How-
ever, the above expressed arguments are the fruits of at least two decades of discussion,
research and debate. Therefore, this section will provide the reader with a short overview
on its origins and evolution.
The acknowledgement of the Earth as a planet with finite resources and of human impact
on the environment appeared long before 1987, in the 1960s (Elkington, 2004). Similarly, dur-
ing the 1970s a rise in the attention to social issues was observed, though it soon disappeared
during the 1980s and 1990s, only to come again with the new century with a new conscious-
ness linking interdependently together the environmental, social, and economic pillars
(Gray and Bebbington, 2000). Therefore, a first phase of environmental concern was raised
in the 1960s based on environmental regulation by governments and a passive, compliant
behavior by businesses (Elkington, 2004). However, this reactive approach by businesses
was shown to lack long-term viability because of its high costs. Business risk aversion and
cost minimization brought firms to act in a more active way (Azapagic and Perdan, 2000).
Elkington (2004) identifies a new phase taking place over the 1970s and the 1980s, charac-
terized by a moment of market liberalizations and privatizations. During this period business
tried to invert the legislation to its favor. At the end of the 1980s, the rise of the sustainability