Why Companies Are Failing at Being Truly Sustainable
And what they can do about it
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend who told me he was helping a corporate run a plastics recycling project. The company is a large manufacturer of plastic, and they wanted to find a way to recycle as much of it as possible when it approached the end of the supply chain — when plastic is used and thrown away.
One question crossed my mind, “Did this company truly care about sustainability, or were they running this project to hit a “sustainability quota”? Sadly, this is a question that I often think about when I hear about companies running such projects.
Note: When I talk about sustainability, I mean the creation of a sustainable society through radical change, not a society where we sustain current systems by patching up problems as we go.
After a little more digging, it became obvious that they didn’t really understand the problem they were trying to solve, and more dangerously, they were armed with a truckload of assumptions. The part that got me though, was that they were trying to outsource the project to an external party with zero experience in sustainability innovation, circular design or recycling.
Unfortunately, sustainability for a lot of businesses today has become a marketing…
