About Sustainability ‘Buzzwords’

and about sustainability itself...

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

As we get ourselves immersed into the Sustainability forest, we might encounter some unknown creatures on the way. And we should be careful! While many of them can provide us guidance and valuable resources to reach our destination, others will try to distract us from the shortest path.

To achieve it, the latter will insist that the shortest path is steeper, and will constantly show us alternative routes where the grasslands are “greener”. But in reality, such paths drive us to endless mazes, where we find ourselves walking with a false sense of progress, only circling around the starting point. We would loose water, food and energy. But most importantly, we would loose time. Our most valuable resource in this journey.

Buzzwords exist in every jargon. They are an inevitable result of us trying to synthesize concepts into something that can be easily understood, memorized and communicated. They usually look and sound good, are catchy, and make logical sense, which eases the process of adoption among the audience. And I think there is nothing wrong with that! In the end, they act as means of communication.

However, buzzwords can also progressively lead to oversimplification. With time, these terms can become so broad that they no longer communicate anything specific, but instead act as enormous umbrellas that cover everything related to their ‘mother concept’. The problem is, as the umbrella grows, so does the wind's sway. And I think this has happened with some sustainability concepts.

The ‘life cycle’ of a buzzword. The ‘mother concept’ usually pertains to a field of study and formally evolves within research, but the buzzword is more a work of the collective. [Own work].

What if we start with Sustainability itself?

Categorizing Sustainability as a buzzword might be a rushed move. On one hand, it is a broad discipline that encompasses various fields of study. Inevitably, it acts as a ‘mother concept’ of others that are more specific, while its genuine importance has led to widespread recognition, which can be easily confused with ‘buzz’.

However, it is also true that our market-driven economy has gradually transformed Sustainability into an aesthetically-pleasing, yet often empty concept. Masked in green imagery, such branding poses significant risks to the urgent transformation we need. Instead of addressing the issue, its primary aim appears to be superficial appearances, while the true impacts remain uncertain.

This is why, inspired by Andreu Escrivà’s work on "Against Sustainability" I decided to offer some unconventional perspectives on a term that, despite its condition, is definitely here to stay.

1. The definition of ‘sustainability’:

There are many definitions of the term, but the most widely accepted has to be the one coined by the United Nations Brundtland Commission in 1987:

“meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

What do you think? I personally like it! I remember reading it as a kid, and it sank in me until today. But at the same time, I understand Escrivà’s argument of subjecting the concept to scrutiny, specially considering that it has been almost 40 years since it was first introduced. Particularly, we can discuss two aspects:

• “the needs”:

Whose needs? They vary so much among ourselves! As introduced in my first article, we all have different expectations according to the context we grew and live in. The ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’. The ‘developing’ and the ‘developed’. The ‘supply’ and the ‘demand’. Different groups of contrasting realities coexisting on the same planet make it almost impossible to see people’s needs as a standardizable checklist. Some people really need a car, others just need clean water. However, it would also be incorrect to standardize varying sets of needs across society.

Global South and Global North. Source: Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School

This gave rise to a new trendy word in the sustainability forest: “wellbeing”. While also relative to our own expectations, we can all access it to the same extent. More like a binary variable, we either ‘are well’ or we aren’t, making the concept more linked to the psychological perception of our reality, than to the access to certain physical goods or belongings. Therefore, it intrinsically decouples the end goal from material consumption, money, or needs, and focuses it more on how we feel. I personally go more with this one, but on this we will further develop in a following article.

Speaking of which… the next aspect is…

• “the future”:

You are in the office; your boss asks when your assignment will be finished, and you answer: “in the future, boss”.

Where is the line between the present and the future? Are we now in the future that was conceived 40 years ago when the definition was written? Or haven’t we arrived there yet?

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Focusing so much in the future has, on this particular topic, made us ‘kick the ball’ way too much. As stated by the Parkinson’s Law:

“work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion.”

Some say 2030, others 2040, the rest 2050. We select good looking years to trace most of sustainability strategies in the World, but keep failing to see substantial and tangible progress on every year’s COP meetings. Sustainability is and should always be seen as matter of the present. Our current practices, our current decisions, our current approvals on fossil fuel investment and subsidies, our current lack of regulation on waste management, our current allowance of fast X (fast fashion, fast tech, fast food, etc.). If we worked more on transforming out current reality, I am sure that the wellbeing of ‘future generations’ will come as a consequence.

2. ‘Sustainable’ as an adjective:

Going back to the buzzword issue.

When I was an engineering student, we had a professor who strongly penalized the use of the word ‘efficient’ without a proper justification. In her view, it had become such an overused term in the jargon of engineering that employing it alone might as well mean nothing. Instead, she encouraged us to always match ‘efficiency’ with the specific resource whose use was being improved. It could be energy, cost, time, materials, or others. But affirming that something is ‘efficient’ alone is rather empty.

The exact same thing happens with ‘sustainable’.

We can see it all over! From sustainable luxury cars to sustainable avocados; the word has become a powerful retailing and marketing strategy to attract customers in almost every sector. The reason for this is well summarized by a recent McKinsey headline:

“customers care about sustainability, and back it up with their wallets”.

Therefore, including something about it in the labels seems to be a good investment for the sake of business. In the same way engineering suppliers and consultants offer ‘more efficient’ operations, some companies are offering ‘more sustainable’ products. But a common factor in many of these claims is failing to disclose specific environmental or social indicators that are actually being improved by their products or services.

I do not intend to generalize, but I have definitely seen a trend; and the issue is that whenever it happens, it once again creates different perceptions of reality across the involved parts:

• The sustainable buyer’s reality: Pays a bit more, but feels satisfied for contributing to a better-performing product/service. Buys as many ‘sustainable products’ they can afford, and then question themselves what else can be done? Expects the market to keep offering ‘more sustainable’ products, and in the meantime, feels no further action is possible.

• The sustainable company’s reality: Hopefully, sees their demand (and income) grow by capitalizing their ‘low hanging fruits’ in terms of material substitution (specially in packaging), renewable energy utilization, recycling and tree-planting. In some cases, organizational (rather than product) carbon footprints are calculated, leaving behind relevant aspects from the supply chain, as well as additional impact categories such as water consumption, land use, resource depletion and others. In general, business models remain mostly unchanged, and keep striving for gradual (and theoretically infinite) financial growth.

• The biosphere’s reality: After decreasing the relative impacts for each production unit, but ultimately increasing demand, the real impacts for the biosphere are uncertain. It is very likely that similar amounts of resources keep being extracted and dumped from and to natural environments in the end. And even in those cases where marginal improvements are done, they don’t get to be in the order of what the transformation requires.

Again, I am describing a fictional scenario, but I honestly feel is not far from the common reality.

As a quick example we have recycling, one of the top-known sustainability strategies. Same as the carbon footprint, the concept was originally introduced to the general public by the Big Oil industry. After having created the problem (of plastic waste), they designed strong advertising campaigns to convince us that their products were safe, because they could be recycled.

Similar to fast food chains or soft drinks advertisement, we absolutely loved it. A material with an infinite use! However, as the Center for Climate Integrity puts it in their recent article, the conception of plastics recycling was a fraud. The material downgrades over time, its collection is complex, the operations are costly and rarely make profit; therefore, most plastic still ends up being dumped or burned. But even so, a product with a 100% recycled packaging is advertised as ‘sustainable’.

Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash

That is exactly the risk of misusing a nice and catchy word - it can distort the reality behind it. Which is why, in my opinion, we should try to reduce the use of ‘sustainable’ as an adjective for a product or service.

To achieve it, we will need to broaden our sustainability language, progressively get out of the carbon and recycling ‘tunnels’, and start talking about alternative environmental and social indicators. We will need to keep transitioning from isolated organizational carbon footprints to integral assessments of the life-cycle impacts across supply chains.

But most importantly, we will have to understand that sustainability is more of a result from a systemic behavior. There is no ‘sustainable product’ that can be infinitely produced. We need to drastically transform the system we are doing business in, and start questioning the business models, our needs, and the relations between money, materials, and wellbeing.

As a fun fact, this article was originally intended to talk about buzzwords and prefixes like ‘green’, ‘bio’, ‘eco’, ‘clean’, ‘nature positive’, ‘environmentally friendly’ and many other nice-sounding terms that we see everyday on the products we buy; but instead, I ended up commenting on the Sustainability itself.

Overall, I think the main point can be already understood: to correctly navigate the Sustainability forest, we need to abstract ourselves from the attractive signs on the way and start seeing the forest from above, as if it was a map. That way we will quickly understand that pretty-looking terms and empty declarations of sustainability will only drive us into a maze that will make us late.

But on the other hand, foundational (but challenging) transformations like dematerializing our business models, questioning our economic system, changing our consumption patterns, and getting ourselves educated on environmental and social sciences will drive us into a steeper but ultimately faster way to our goal.