Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

How is Ecological Sustainability Achieved?

First, we need to understand that the only truly sustainable production processes are those that make production integral to the ecological system. Like an earthworm, an ecologically sustainable factory processes materials so that anything superfluous to the production process ends up in the natural world either environmentally neutral or actually helping sustain a healthy ecology. For example, effluent becomes clean water. This demands (a) a new emphasis on life cycle assessment of products and stewardship of resources and (b) the elimination of waste and pollution, particularly by product redesign and developing an industrial ecology where the “waste” from one firm's production process is a resource ...