Sustainability: business, life, environment

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."  Interesting, because as a sustainability consultant, I might call that a zero waste mindset.  For instance, traditionally, waste has been accepted as a natural by-product of our manufacturing processes and as part of our culture.  However, with the increase of eco awareness and sustainable business strategies, approaching waste differently is yielding surprising results. 
 
Zero waste is a philosophy and a design principle for the 21st Century. It includes recycling but goes beyond recycling by taking a 'whole system' approach to the vast flow of resources and waste through human society.   It shifts the responsibility for materials entering the waste stream on the front-end with the manufacturer, not on the consumer at the back-end of the product's life. The end result is that manufacturers redesign products to reduce material consumption and facilitate reuse, recycling and recovery. 
 
What are components of zero waste?

• redesigns the current, one-way industrial system into a circular system modeled on Nature's successful strategies
• challenges badly designed business systems that "use too many resources to make too few people more productive"
• addresses, through job creation and civic participation, increasing wastage of human resources and erosion of democracy
• helps communities achieve a local economy that operates efficiently, sustains good jobs, and provides a measure of self-sufficiency.
• aims to eliminate rather than manage waste

 
Companies with a long standing commitment to corporate sustainability plan, such as Interface, are achieving stellar results. Starting off with waste reduction and reusing materials, Interface was able to reduce the amount of waste that it sent to landfill to the lowest amount yet. Of the 400 million pounds of raw material that it purchased in 2009, 3.4 million pounds (less than 1 percent) went to landfill.
 
Zero waste maximizes recycling, minimizes waste, reduces consumption and ensures that products are made to be reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or the marketplace.