How business can change the World

How Business Can Change the World (Reflection Paper)

Global sustainable development is one of today’s most important problematics. Some countries are trying to contribute to its achievement by signing eco-friendly agreements or by passing laws to encourage people’s participation. Though global warming isn’t the only reason we should support global sustainability, it is the most visible problem resulting from pollution and poor actions taken by companies nowadays. It is probably going to get worse with the population growth expected to go from 6 to 9 billion between the years 2000 and 2050, but most people have been used to their own lifestyle for centuries and don’t want to change it. This is why business could be the one to make the first move and look for solutions we can afford and apply today.

Before the 1980s, most companies acted ignorant and oblivious to the environmental cause and tried not to take responsibility for their pollution and poor management. Today more and more of them can’t escape from governments’ surveillance and cooperate to pursue new technologies that have the potential to be inherently clean. Their new challenge is to move “beyond greening”, to take care of social and environmental issues, but also to build a global foundation for innovation and growth in the future. Favor “life cycle management” of products is one of the first step we could make by taking into account the entire life of products, from the sourcing of raw materials to their remanufacture or return to Earth.

To help with the sustainability challenge, new clean technologies – or technologies of the future – could be used differently than they are right now. Bio and nanotechnology are creating products and services at the molecular level and could definitely eliminate pollution by taking care of it at the source. One of the most spectacular and, somehow, feared technique is biomimicry which recreates nature’s processes to produce new resources scientifically. This technology is still decried by people against science reproducing natural phenomenons in laboratories but could help us to not be dependent on the stocks of raw materials we have. Renewable energies such as water are also key to confronting carbons emissions and to stabilize the climate, but even if they are called “renewable” they should be protected because they are the ones supporting our economics (money economy, traditional economy and nature’s economy). If they reach a critical level, they could be gone and not be replaced, therefore the biggest threat to sustainability is their disappearance.

Other radical solutions proposed by experts suggest decreasing the population or levels of affluence, but they would require too much efforts and are not really practical in real life. The first one isn’t really proved to work because we can only make assumptions and estimations about how Earth will be populated in a few years, the population’s rate is also proved to be already slowing down. The second option is also not ideal because redistributing equally the total wealth of the millionaires in the World wouldn’t be enough to improve the whole population’s life ($6,000 each).

One of the companies’ biggest fears is to spend too much money on the quest for global sustainable development, but it is quite the opposite. If they

...