From environmental excellence to sustainability

Abstract

Several decades of technical accomplishments in making environmental improvements to products and processes have taught us that it is possible to achieve environmental improvements while not making real strides towards the goal of sustainability. Cleaner products, in practice, can boost demand for consumption, thus using greater per capita non-renewable natural resources. For instance, the improvement of automobile engine performance has paved the way for our propensity to drive bigger cars with lower mileage per gallon or simply to drive longer distances. A better direction for the future therefore begs for achieving sustainability than for merely improving environmental performance. Realizing the importance of resource conservation and its societal and ecological benefits, many multi-national corporations have already begun programs to address sustainable development issues. Sustainable development, however, is not limited to manufacturing systems only. Civic units, such as cities, regions, and watersheds in many parts of the world are also being evaluated from this viewpoint. These activities undertaken in the interest of sustainable development are in keeping with the awareness created by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). As is evident, sustainability refers to a system that needs to be appropriately defined. Not all systems we can consider can be defined on the basis of global environmental, ecological and developmental attributes and metrics. Sustainability of a village cannot obviously mean the same thing as sustainability of the planet. For systems smaller than the planet Earth, care has to be taken in choosing metrics so as to assure that the metrics provide a real measure of progress towards sustainability while not adversely affecting the surroundings. When done correctly, progress towards sustainability of smaller systems will complement the sustainability of the planet. As I have attempted to show in a Perspective article published in the AIChE Journal (vol 49, no. 8, p. 1929, 2003), if we can design aggregate metrics to represent the environmental, ecological and developmental aspects of a system, we achieve real progress towards sustainability only when all three metrics show improvement independently. Finding a scientific way to devise these three aggregate metrics is, however, a difficult undertaking. The greatest challenge before scientists, technologists, and policy makers today is to devise sustainability metrics that describe quantitatively progress made in a system, be it a manufacturing process or an ecosystem. Someday in the future when we have some expertise in certifying progress towards sustainability, we would need to be able to recognize attainment of sustainability when we actually arrive there. Editorial Clean Techn Environ Policy 6 (2003) 1 DOI 10.1007/s10098-003-0237-4