Seven Steps to Doing Good Business

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If a tiny fraction of the world's most intelligent companies cannot model a sustainable world, that may tell us that the environmentalism currently practiced by business, laudable as it may be, is only part of the overall solution, and that rather than having a human or management problem, what we may have is a design problem that is intrinsic to all business.

To create an enduring society, we need to devise a system of commerce and production in which each and every act is sustainable and restorative. Business will not be able to fulfill its social contract with the environment or society until the system in which it operates undergoes a fundamental change, a change that brings commerce and governance into alignment with the natural world. Because every act in an industrial society leads to further environmental degradation, regardless of intention, we need to imagine and then design a system of commerce in which the opposite is true, in which doing good is second nature, in which the natural, everyday acts of work and life cumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of altruism.

The prospect of a major redesign of our commercial system, while daunting, is exhilarating; it opens the doors to real long-term prosperity. It's daunting because the system we presently engage grew from linear "progress" built of incremental advances over a long period of time. It would be hard to describe our present industrialized, carbon-fuel system as a result of sophisticated analysis focused on the health of the greater whole. At the beginning of the industrial age, it was difficult to recognize the complexity and fragility of nature. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the 1830s, at the cusp of the industrial revolution, stated that "nature...refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf." We now know that even those are mutable, and we must incorporate that awareness into all systems of design, production, and activity if we truly seek prosperity.

At present the environmental movement consists of many different initiatives connected primarily by values and belief rather than by design. If design is the first signal of human intention, then a plan to create a sustainable future should realize its objectives through practical, clearly stated goals and strategies. For the record, we suggest the following as being fundamental to achieving commercial prosperity and environmental sanity:

1. Goal: Eliminate the concept of waste.
It's no longer a question of what to do with our waste, but of how to make things so that there is no waste. Seminal to this principle is the understanding that pollution and toxicity are always and irrevocably products of inefficiency. They are not the inevitable outcome of human interaction with the environment but the built-in results of the design of our system. Designing manufacturing and living systems that create no waste is both economical and prosperous. It is more practical than industrialism, not less. When we examine the fundamental characteristics of nature, we see how the principle of waste equaling food permeates all natural systems. Everything is constantly cycled in nature. There is abundant waste in nature, just as there is in industry, but in nature waste constantly flows back into living systems. That principle is the key to true economics. Thus, whenever we design and make a product, the first question we have to ask is, Whose food will this product be when its present life is over?

Strategy: Transform the making of things.
We have to institute the Intelligent Product System created by Michael Braungart of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency, in Hamburg, Germany. Under the system, there can be only three types of products, and eventually only two. The first are consumables, products that either are eaten or, when placed on the ground, turn into soil without any harmful side effects. In other words, they're products whose waste equals food for other living systems. At present many of the products that should be "consumable" are not. Cotton contains hundreds of chemicals, plasticizers, defoliants, pesticides, and dyes; shoes are tanned with chromium and shoe soles contain lead; and silk blouses contain zinc, tin, and toxic dyestuffs. On the other hand, products such as toothpaste tubes and other nonbiodegradable packaging can be made out of natural polymers so they can break down and become fertilizer for plants. Much of the recycling done today generates some toxic by-products and may consume more energy than it saves. We should be designing more things that can be thrown away -- but into the compost heap. Heretical it may seem, but designing for decomposition is the way of the world around us.

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