MARTIN HABEKOST
Golden Rule of Future Printing
Business is rife with overused phraseology like value-add and solutions
provider that is too often relied upon
by companies trying to articulate what
products or services they provide. Over
time, these common-sense terms lose
their punch and instead become more
closely associated with a lack of business
direction rather than business progress.
Sustainability is clearly the business
world’s current common-sense descrip-tor and so, without attempting to judge
its survivability, it becomes important to
understand why this word is being leveraged to describe environmentally
minded business practices.
The use of sustainability as a business
term can be traced back to 1983 when
the United Nations General Assembly
first began recognizing environmental
problems were global in nature. In the
1980s, more and more world-leading scientists were linking deterioration in the
human environment and natural resources with similar deterioration in
economic and social development. The
UN was alarmed because scientists theorized this deterioration was accelerating
and so the Bruntland Commission (then
operating under another name) was established to find long-term environmental strategies among countries, both
rich and poor. This link between economics and the environment is the result
of globalization. Over the past couple of
centuries, Western powers industrialized
Most
favoured Prevention
option
Minimisation
Reuse
Recycling
Disposal
by exploiting the environment, rarely
considering natural resources to be anything more than high-octane to drive
their growth, as if there was an unlimited
amount of natural goods to be harvested.
Once again, the modern world was ignoring lessons from the past as historians
in the 1980s, through their own rapid
growth in research technology, began to
link environmental collapse to the destruction of some of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. A
favorite example of sustainability scientists is Easter Island, which was discovered
by Europeans in 1722. The small, barren
island now famous for its massive face-heavy statues lies 2,000 miles off the west
coast of South America in the Pacific
Ocean – 1,250 miles from the nearest inhabitable land. A complete mystery for
centuries, historians now believe the island was settled by a Polynesian civilization that erected these statues as symbols
of their power, and in so doing, completely overriding ecological considerations for their civilization’s survival,
stripping the land of trees.
While Easter Island, being so isolated,
was certainly fragile to begin with, environmentalists also point to the collapse
of the Mayan civilization as a symbol of
what may happen to our own world. The
Mayan, some argue, collapsed around
ninth century AD in large part because
the population growth of the civilization
outstripped available resources. Certainly today, population growth is one of
the most disturbing trends in efforts en-
suing of global sustainability. The
world’s population explosion over the
past few decades certainly led the UN to
create the Bruntland Commission,
which following a report called Our
Common Future, presented what is now a
widely accepted definition of sustainability: “[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own
needs.” There are now dozens of definitions of the term sustainability, as determined by significant groups like the
World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The attention to define
sustainability is why perhaps this term
among so many other common-sense
descriptors in business might just hang
around as meaningful direction for marketing, technology and manufacturing
in the printing industry.
Least
favoured
option
Energy Recovery
The long path to sustainability involves maximizing elements from the top of this
pyramid, though it is by far the most difficult to achieve.
Sustainability to print
Among all the definitions and confusion
of sustainability, Herman Daly probably
put it best when he asked, “What use is a
sawmill without a forest?” Daly is described as an ecological economist, stemming from his work as a senior
economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank. His simple
question is vital in trying to understand
what exactly sustainability means. If it is
being applied to environmental issues,
should be recognized as being green sustainable development, as opposed to just
sustainable development. This might
seem like semantics, but it is a vital dis-
