Seven Steps to Doing Good Business

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The second category is products of service. These are what are known as durables, such as cars, computers, TVs, VCRs, and refrigerators. These would never be sold, only licensed. They would always belong to the original manufacturer. That means they would be made, employed, and returned within a closed-loop system. This process is already being instituted in Germany -- and to a lesser extent in Japan -- where companies are beginning to design products for disassembly. If a company knows its products will come back someday and that it cannot throw anything away when they do, it creates a very different design and materials ethic.

Last, there are products Braungart calls unsalables -- radioactive material, heavy metals, and persistent toxins. There is no living system for which those are food, and thus they can never be thrown away. Unsalables would always belong to the original maker. They would be safeguarded by public utilities called Parking Lots, which would store the toxins in glass-lined barrels indefinitely, charging the original manufacturers rent for the privilege. The rent would cease when an independent scientific panel could confirm that there was a safe method to detoxify the substances in question. All toxic chemicals would have molecular markers identifying them as belonging to their originator -- such as Dow Chemical, Occidental Petroleum, or Du Pont -- so that if they were found in wells, rivers, soil, or fish, it would be the responsibility of the company to retrieve them, mitigate them, or clean them up. As with products of service, this would place the problem of toxicity with the makers, where it belongs, making them responsible for its full life-cycle effects.

2. Goal: Restore accountability.
In a system in which even shareholders must struggle to hold corporate management accountable, citizens have lost virtually all vestiges of control over the ways in which corporations affect their lives. Physicist Amory Lovins has said that "any system that doesn't use feedback is stupid." Although corporations will point to the marketplace as a powerful source of control and feedback, it is only one source and doesn't take into account the lives of workers, the long-term effects on resources, the destiny of communities, or the injuries and harm due to long-term exposure to toxins and pollution.

Strategy: Take back the charter.
Although corporate charters may have little to do with environmental sustainability on the surface, their status is critical to any long-term movement toward restoration of the environment. Read "Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and Charter of Incorporation," a pamphlet by Richard Grossman and Frank T. Adams (Charter Ink, PO Box 806, Cambridge, MA 02140; 508-487-3151; 1992). In it you will find a history of lost corporate power and citizen involvement that addresses a basic and crucial point: corporations are chartered by, and exist at the behest of, citizens. Incorporation is not a right but a privilege granted by the state, one that includes certain considerations such as limited liability. Corporations are supposed to be under our ultimate authority, not the other way around. The charter of incorporation is a revocable dispensation that was supposed to ensure the accountability of the corporation to society as a whole.

When any corporation continually harms, abuses, or violates the public trust, citizens should have the right to initiate a process that would revoke the company's charter, cause it to disband, sell off its enterprises to other companies, and effectively go out of business. The workers would have jobs with the new owners, but the executives, directors, and management would be out of jobs, with a permanent notice on their rÉsumÉs that they managed a corporation into charter revocation. That would be not merely a deterrent to corporate abuse but a critical element of an ecological society, because it would create negative-feedback loops that would prompt accountability, citizen involvement, and learning.

3. Goal: Make prices reflect costs.
The economy is environmentally and commercially dysfunctional because the market doesn't provide consumers with proper information. The "free market" economics that we love so much are excellent at setting prices but lousy when it comes to recognizing costs.

In order for a sustainable society to exist, every purchase should reflect or at least approximate its actual cost, not only the direct cost of production but the cost to the air, water, and soil; the cost to future generations; the cost to worker health; and the cost of waste, pollution, and toxicity. For example, the World Resources Institute, in Washington, D.C., has estimated that the cost of a gallon of gas, when pollution, waste disposal, health effects, and defense expenditures like the Persian Gulf War are factored in, is approximately $4.50, four times what we pay at the pump. A study by the University of California at San Francisco showed that a pack of cigarettes costs citizens in the state another $3.63 in health care and related costs. Economist Robert Repetto estimates that traffic congestion costs an extra $200 billion a year in wasted fuel, lost time, wear and tear, accidents, and higher insurance premiums.

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