Sustainability: Fad or Future?

Sustainability is a buzzword ever where, and it is used so much it has lost it's meaning. anything can be considered sustainable if it is spun correctly, and the political types spend huge amounts on ensuring things get spun just the right way. The green revolution we are hoping to survive through is very much politically motivated, once enough people believe the spin, those in government take up the banner, good bad or indifferent. Normally powered by those special interest groups with the deepest pockets or those with the best lobbies. We are unfortunately stuck with this for a while until the next fabricated crisis comes along. I am all in favor of clean air and clean water, it's just the approach that upsets me. with the clean approach we all win, less missed time due to better health thus higher productivity, but it does cost more. That is the catch.

We can all do better by recycling but the how is the difficult part, people want us, the manufacturing industry to be green, but if they find out their favorite sweater is made of recycled plastic diapers they freak out, a very hard path to follow.

When petroleum prices drop, and that will only happen once the future trades are reigned in, prices will drop substantially and public pressure will follow thus ending the current frenzy.

The alternate manufacturing with more recycled materials and cleaner practices are still a good idea, we all gain from that, and cleaner will work out to less cost in the long run.

Sorry for babbling on, slow day here....

"Sustainability" had better be sustainable, or we'll be out of resources before we can develop alternatives. For this to work, though, everybody will have to revisit what they think of as 'taking the long view'. For some, this might mean planning for next Wednesday's dinner menu. For some, perhaps planning for retirement at the age of 30 is a long view. For a few, maybe looking ahead by a century would fill the bill. But truly taking the long view means considering where we will likely be in a thousand years.

Ten thousand years is not practical - too many variables not involving our actions. But a thousand years hence, where might we be if there are no significant changes in how we do what it is we do? If the answer is not desirable, tweak one factor at a time until long-term sustainability takes hold and we prosper. I predict that we will soon find that we have already exceeded the planetary carrying capacity for our species unless we change our 'wicked' ways.

The problem with sustainability is that it is another buzz word. If the public are informed and are shown that cotton accounts for up to 70% of the gross tonnage of pesticides in the world just for growing this crop, it suddenly looks like a non environmentally friendly fibre. If we look at denim, an easy answer was provided by monsanto when they genetically engineered blue cotton, the public heard genetically engineered and outcry followed, the fact that most of the cotton produced in the world is genetically engineered is by the by. Organic cotton is unattainable as the global organic standard wants the use of natural dyes, this would take up 3 times the worlds surface to grow. So do we use recycled polyester, UK reatilers recently did, but the polyester was from recycled plastic bottles, this normally gets made into more plastic bottles, thus as a textile was environmentally poor because it cannot be made into anything else. There is an answer, just stop lurching from one buzz word to another and come out with a long term strategy that is flexible enough to change when necessary

Sorry for the long delay, illness can't be planned very well! Actually, the artificial grass usually referred to as "astroturf" is made from recycled plastic soda bottles.