With our current processes so geared up to taking raw materials and converting them into some product which is used for a few years and then thrown away and replaced, it’s hard to imagine what truly sustainable business looks like!

Maybe you’ve already seen/heard of the “Story of Stuff” webumentary. It’s on a fairly basic level and I found the presenter a little irritating but it seems to have done an admirable job of presenting some of these kind of ideas to a wider (American) audience.

Darn, I thought I might have invented a word with “webumentary” but it seems not. That’s the third time today I’ve had an idea that I thought was original only to find the internet has beaten me to it!

I think a lot of our problems stem from paradigms of production which are too linear – take materials, process, produce, sell, deal with waste and pollution.

Truly sustainable business takes its cue from natural ecosystems which deomstrate that cycles and interconnectedness can be a source of strength – it designs its products to make no waste, and even to use the waste stream of others as raw materials (all within the limits of the solar budget, and bearing in mind entropy, of which I understand very little!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_ecology
http://www.johnehrenfeld.com/Kalundborg.pdf

And I love NEF. Andrew Simm spoke at one of our events, they’re great people.

Half way though he gets to the point of his plan: prohibit the manufacture and sale of traditional tungsten filament light bulbs. He runs though the numbers and concludes it would save the US (It’s an American blog) 29 billion dollars per year. Every year. Plus there are the inevitable environmental benefits.

1) It may be 30 years before this happens ‘organically’ without incentives etc by which point it may well be too late
2) Our infrastructure, as in cars, power stations, jobs, supply chains, refineries etc are all focused around fossil fuels and the cost of changing that may significantly delay a wholesale changeover, even when costs become equal or even slightly cheaper.
3) Tax/subsidy energy policy would also be a catalyst for innovation in green technologies