Building Sustainable Business Summary

Building Sustainable Business
Summary.

,History and impact of sustainable
development
People have dreams, like Severn Suzuki (12) and Greta Thunberg (15). They both silenced
the united nations with their speeches.
Challenges of the 21st century:
 Population growth
 Consumption Society
 …
Kenneth Boulding:
 Earth is a spaceship (1966)
 We need to survive with the resources we have
Essay of the principles of population:
 Thomas Malthus (1798)
 Technology makes us get a higher output of resources
 Population grows exponentially
 The crossing point between the two is a problem
 Solution?
 People have less kids if there is higher welfare
 China stopped one child policy
 More old people than young people
Population explosion:
 More population in less developed countries
 Correlation with oil production?
 Very strong
 Transport, heat, etc.
 Automating a lot of industries  Increased food production

,  1980
 Oil crises
 Car restrictions (Sundays)
 Scared
 Peak oil:
 The moment in time our planet produced the most oil, the day after the oil
production globally started to decrease.
 We move oil production to difficult places (Antarctica)
 Economic impact
 Other ways of transportation
 Plastic is made out of oil  Businesses need to revise business plans
Depletion natural resources:
 Uranium is used for nuclear power (also running out)
 Why we don’t use Thorium:
 You can’t make nuclear bombs with this, so they decided to use
uranium.
 Coltan in our mobile phones
 Africa
 War for resources
 Water
 Filtering salt water
 Jeans are a huge problem
 India, Coca-Cola pumps all the water for own use so farmers can’t maintain
crops.
 Doritos
 Use of palm oil, rainforest needs to be cut down
 Easter Island
 Resources on the island were overused
 Population decreased dramatically
 Spaceship metaphor, population grew too high
Pollution and loss of biodiversity:
 Smog
 Plastic found in fish
 More extreme weather
Consumption society:
 Story of stuff (can explain linear and circular system)
 You cannot use a linear system on a finite planet
 Governments are more concerned in pleasing corporations
 Production is too toxic
 In our pillows there is a toxic way of making them less flammable
 Moving polluted industry does not help
 Externalized costs
 Health, poverty, environment
 Golden arrow of system
 Victor Lebow
 Turning consumption into a ritual

,  Planned obsolescence
 Let product break fast enough but keep customer loyal
 Perceived obsolescence
 Making social differences (social embarrassment)
 Work-watch-spend
 We go to work, we come home and see commercials telling us we suck, we
go to the mall to buy something to make us feel better and we go back to
work to pay for the things we just bought.

1. Global approach: history

 1972
 Club of Rome
 1973
 UNEP (UN Environment Programme)
 1983
 UNCED (Commission on Environment and Development)
 1987
 Brundtland report
 Norwegian prime minister
 Come together with a group of people to write a report
 ‘Our common Future’
 1992
 Rio Declaration
 Called ‘Earth Summit’
 1997
 Kyoto protocol
 1999
 Protests in Seattle
 We should stop globalization. Anti-globalists or other-globalists
 ‘Another world’
 2000 – 2015
 UN Millennium Declaration
 Smart objectives, goals
 Very few goals were accomplished
 2016
 New goals, SDG’s (Sustainable Development Goals)

2. Definition Sustainable Development

 “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable - to ensure that it meets
the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs.”
 The richest continent is also the poorest (resources)
 Belgium got rich because of Congo
 Final goal is to make sure we meet the needs of present and future generations on
earth
 By redistributing wealth, through taxes
 By controlling growth