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Sustainable consumption: Opportunity or oxymoron?

August 19, 2010

Imagine that you’re the chief sustainability officer of a FORTUNE 500 company. During a meeting with your CEO, you say: “We need to talk to consumers about using less.”

Improbable? Sure.

Impossible? Perhaps not.

An important conversation to start? Absolutely.

So, at least, says Aron Cramer, the CEO of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a nonprofit association of companies, whose mission is to promote a just and sustainable world.

“The American model of consumption cannot be extended to the entire world, and won’t be, because the planet simply can’t support it,” Aron told me, when we spoke by phone the other day. Yet billions of people around the world want to improve their standard of living. Figuring out how they can enjoy a better life, without destroying the environment, “is the mother of all innovation challenges,” Aron says,

Last month, BSR published a 26-page report called The New Frontier in Sustainability: The Business Opportunity in Tackling Sustainable Consumption [PDF, free download). It’s an attempt to get business leaders to think about what sustainable consumption might look like.

The topic “has been the third rail of sustainability politics,” Aron told me, but he added, with his usual optimism, that “more companies are ready to have this discussion.”

If nothing else, the report makes clear the urgency of the issue. Citing a WWF report [PDF], it says:

By recent estimates, our global footprint now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 percent, and if our current demands continue, by 2030 we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.

And yet:

…countless people have insufficient access to basic needs like food, clean water, and adequate shelter, and they also lack access to the resources they need to improve their lives. In 2006, the 1.2 billion people in the OECD countries had an average annual income per capita of US$30,580, while the 5.4 billion people in the rest of the world earned an average of US$3,130. Of those, 19 percent suffer from hunger, 28 percent are drinking polluted water, and 29 percent are illiterate.7 More than 2 billion people continue to rely on less than US$2 per day to meet their needs.

The question is, what business opportunities, if any,  await companies that figure out how to give poor and middle class people what they want in a sustainable way? [click to continue…]

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Have Americans stopped loving their cars?

January 7, 2010

2009 was a terrible year for Detroit, the worst in three decades. Americans bought 10.4 million cars — 21% fewer than in 2008 and a whopping 40% fewer than the 17 million or so cars and light trucks sold, on average, in the early 2000s.

A Thunderbird convertible

A Thunderbird convertible

This is normally seen as bad news, and anyone who’s visited Detroit lately understands why. But what if the bad news for U.S. automakers, their workers and the economy of the industrial Midwest turns out to be good for the rest of us?

That’s the argument being made by environmentalist and author Lester Brown. If fewer cars are being driven fewer miles, America’s dependence on imported oil will decrease, as will air pollution, carbon emissions, traffic congestion, respiratory diseases and the demand for new roads or highways.

Because Americans scrapped 14 million cars last year, there are fewer registered vehicles in the U.S. today than there were a year ago–about 246 million, according to Brown, who is president of the Earth Policy Institute. The U.S. now has more registered cars than licensed drivers, of which there are 209 million.

“When is enough enough?,” Brown asks. “Continuing growth in our car fleet is no longer in our national interest or in our interest as individuals.”

What’s more, the drop in car sales may be more than a reflection of a down economy. America’s century-old love affair with the automobile may be coming to an end, Brown said yesterday during a conference call with reporters.

This is a bold claim and, while I’m not persuaded that he’s right, Brown’s ideas are worth thinking about. He says  that an array of forces—ranging from urbanization to rising oil prices to the popularity of text messages and Facebook among teenagers—mean that more Americans are learning to live without a car. [click to continue…]

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