Quotes about Sustainability

Innovation is premised on force-feeding people more junk; on fuelling artificial needs for super-size meals, Hummers, and a new pair of sweatshop-produced fast-fashion jeans every weekend.

Sustainability, on the other hand, is premised on helping people finally step off that creaking treadmill of consumption.

Home should be a sanctuary, a place that feels safe and healthy, looks beautiful, and smells wonderful. Seriously... make it a place that you can come to and have an immediate feeling of… Aaaaah. I'm home. Awesome.
 
You don't need to hire a decorator or buy all new stuff or take on a new mortgage. Greening your house will go a long way toward making wherever you are an oasis. A green home is the most sanctuary-like home around - by which I mean it's beautiful and healthy and it smells terrific.

I am not a veteran environmentalist. I don't live in a house made of recycled tires, I've never handcuffed myself to a tree, and I don't grow my own organic rutabaga.

The human race will quickly learn to live sustainably once its greatest minds are no longer awestruck by egotistical ideologies and theologies that divide humanity, and no longer find themselves wasting valuable human and natural resources in the development, design, production, marketing and sales of worthles products.

Basically, our goal is to make sure that when it comes to water and energy, we replenish the environment and leave it in a net zero state. So across the world we have unleashed the power of our people to come up with ideas to reduce, recycle replenish the environment and we are making great progress by reducing how much water we use in our manufacture and the carbon footprint that we put on the environment. As a consequence, what we are seeing is an incredible investment in all these environment initiatives. But is otherwise really in two ways, one is tangible financial investment, second is a huge return on investment and because new employees are usually idealistic young people who just graduated from college. They want to come to a company to work for a purpose, that is wise about the next generation.

I had always tried to live my life fairly simply and by 1991, knowing what I knew about the state of the environment, I had begun to eat lower on the food chain and reduce my consumption of material goods. Doing risk sports had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to “have it all,” the sooner it will die.

I took a dozen of our top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of the real Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wild lands, we asked ourselves why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted Patagonia to be. A billion-dollar company? Okay, but not if it meant we had to make products we couldn’t be proud of. And we discussed what we could do to help stem the environmental harm we caused as a company. We talked about the values we had in common, and the shared culture that had brought everyone to Patagonia, Inc., and not another company.

Fiat money and sustainable society are not compatible.

I used to be skeptical of global warming, but now I'm absolutely convinced that the world is spiraling out of control. CO2 is like a bushfire that gets bigger and bigger every year.

All of us who are in a position to do something about it must do something about it. Because Virgin is involved with planes and trains, we have even more responsibility. So we've put aside quite a lot of money to invest in alternative fuels. Over the next four years, we'll invest something like $1 billion in alternative fuels.

The money is going into a whole series of different things like building ethanol plants. We're looking into wind power. We're looking into solar. And we're also actually working on developing a new kind of fuel, which I can't say much about but which is quite exciting.

Yeah, leading an examined life, I always say, is a pain in the ass. It adds an element of complexity to business that most businessmen don't want to hear about. They just want to call a fabric manufacturer, and say, "Hey, give us 10,000 yards of shirting."

...we've teamed up with some Japanese companies to, basically by 2010, make all our clothing out of recycled and recyclable fibers. And we're going to accept ownership of our products from birth to birth. So if you buy a jacket from us, or a shirt ,or a pair of pants, when you're done with it, you can give it back to us and we'll make more shirts and pants out of it.

Which is a different idea about consuming. Right now the world runs on consuming and discarding, and we're saying that we're taking responsibility for our products from birth to birth. Can you imagine if a computer company said, "When you're done with your computer, we'll buy it back from you and make more computers out of it." Instead, they sell you computer and you can't even get service from them!

It's a different way of accepting responsibility.

We need an honest bottom line. Today that bottom line is vastly subsidized. If anyone of us were paying the full cost of oil our bottom lines would be very different. If you internalize the cost of oil, look at the cost of the war in the Middle East or the cost of global warming for future generations, if you internalize those external costs and what you pay, that bottom line would look very different, what ever business you are in. If we somehow put a value on species extinction and factor that into our costs that bottom line would look very different. IF we put any resource depletion into costs our bottom line would change. So what we have is a dishonest market that does not take into account all the costs when it establishes its prices. We need an honest marketplace before we can let the market work for sustainability rather than against it as it works today.

We began to tackle the face of mountain we identified as waste. We defined waste, by the way, as any cost that we incurred that does not add value to our customer and that translates to doing everything right the first time, every time. It’s not just waste material, scrapped and low quality and so forth. If you send something to the wrong destination and have to get it back and reship it -- that’s waste. If you incur a bad debt -- that’s waste. So we defined waste very broadly and over time we actually said that any energy that comes from fossil fuel by our definition is waste and we need to eliminate it. We really began to think in different ways about our business in terms of climbing this mountain and it became very clear very quickly this was the smart thing to do. Not only did we start to generate answers for those customers, they embraced us for what we were trying to do. The goodwill in the market place has just been stunning. The rest of the business case is pretty simple. I cost it down not up.

During the last five years, those four advantages—costs, products, people, goodwill—have been the salvation of Interface during a recession that saw our primary marketplace shrink by 38% from peak to trough—38%! As a heavily leveraged company with over $400 million in debt, we might not have made it without the sustainability initiative and, especially, the support of our customers. This revised definition of success—this new paradigm—has a name: “Doing well by doing good”. It is a better way to bigger profits.

For nearly 11 years, now, we have been on this mission; we call it, “climbing Mt. Sustainability”, a mountain higher than Everest, to meet at that point at the top that symbolizes zero footprint—zero environmental impact. Sustainable: taking nothing, doing no harm.

Marketing needs to define what sustainability means for their company and then decide how to express those values in their offerings. Companies should stop trying to appeal to green consumers by building green myths into the products they have and start creating something real—products that tell their environmental story for them.

...there's no such thing as sustainability. There are just levels of it. It's a process, not a real goal. All you can do is work toward it. There's no such thing as any sustainable economy. The only thing I know that's even close to sustainable economic activity would be organic farming on a very small scale or hunting and gathering on a very small scale. And manufacturing, you end up with way more waste than you end up with finished product. It's totally unsustainable. It's just the way it is.

What they don't realize is that I'm not in the business to make clothes. I'm not in the business to make more money for myself, for Christ's sake. This is the reason Patagonia exists -- to put into action the recommendations I read about in books to avoid environmental collapse. That's the reason I'm in business -- to try to clean up our own act, and try to influence other companies to do the right thing, and try to influence our customers to do the right thing. So we're not going to change. They can go buy from somewhere else if they don't like it.

Ultimately, we believe a company's long-term ability to contribute to society is dependant on creating a competitive return for its owners--and in our case, that includes employee-owners. Earning a superior return on capital is the only way to ensure you're sustainable as a business.

The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competetive.

My vision for saving the planet holds that you not only need to work with communities and governments but also the forces … that are driven largely by business. We will fail if we don’t change the behavior of business and how it touches the places we care about.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, the supply chain will include products from all around the world. Whether we’re talking about fabric made in China, soybeans grown in the Amazon, palm oil harvested in Indonesia, biofuels created in Africa—companies will have to know how their products and the raw materials they use in their operations are affecting places, people, biodiversity, and the environment.

Yes, I am optimistic about the environment. If you assume business is exerting the most negative influence on the environment and also has the possibility to impact it positively, there are a bunch of forces that are impacting business that are fundamentally different from the situation 3 or 4 years ago. There are pressures to be transparent that just didn't exist before and these pressures are coming from unlikely places, such as the insurance industry. In the most recent issue of The Ecologist, the editorial asked what is having the most positive impact on global warming. The answer is the insurance industry. Unlike the current administration, the insurance industry has made its mind up for reasons of self-preservation. For purely pragmatic reasons, they are increasing pressure on big business to reduce C02 emissions. In a similar way in Europe, the Association of Insurers has concluded that increased transparency is critical to understand the risk that an insurance company has in insuring a company. That pressure to provide that transparency in and of itself can cause change.

having enough for now, while not harming the future.

...you have to design with positive principles and positive goals. Modern industrial culture doesn’t seem to have principles, except something like: “If brute force isn’t working, you are not using enough of it.” While its goals are unclear, its de facto goal appears to be to create ecological and human tragedy. If you play a game, you have to have a clear goal; in chess, you’re going to take a king. So we have an end game in mind because without this strategy becomes meaningless. What we seek is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean water, air, soil and power, that is economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.

Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager's job to "do things right." It is an executive's job to make sure "the right things" get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more "efficient." Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things -- on the right products and services and systems -- instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.

Human cultures progress through a dance of specialization and integration.  The problem is that the human trait of abstract thinking has allowed our ability to specialize to outpace our ability to integrate knowledge.  Thus, we know more and more details about nothing particularly relevant.  Life becomes a game of trivia played between people who don't have an intrinsic understanding of who, or what, they are and who have little idea how larger social, scientific and cultural systems operate. 

All the "freedom" in the world can not solve this problem, but rather leads to greater confusion.  Lack of freedom throws us into panick and again causes confusion.  We often seek grounding in religion or political movements, but the price of suspending our disbelief is our relinquishment of authority to others no more qualified than the rest of us.  We can not afford, in our globalized, interdependent world, to turn over our otherwise intelligent minds to ideologies and theologies.  We can not afford the divisiveness and arrogance inherent when one believes that theirs is the only way, the "right" way, and that other paths are "evil" or inferior even if they work very well.

If we declare our race to be HUMAN, our religion to be KINDNESS and our nature to be A WONDERFUL SPECIES OF PRIMATES, we will gradually learn to exercise rational control over our minds, our culture and our planet.

The Key to Sustainability is Community.

I used to be skeptical of global warming, but now I'm absolutely convinced that the world is spiraling out of control. CO2 is like a bushfire that gets bigger and bigger every year.

All of us who are in a position to do something about it must do something about it. Because Virgin is involved with planes and trains, we have even more responsibility. So we've put aside quite a lot of money to invest in alternative fuels. Over the next four years, we'll invest something like $1 billion in alternative fuels.

The money is going into a whole series of different things like building ethanol plants. We're looking into wind power. We're looking into solar. And we're also actually working on developing a new kind of fuel, which I can't say much about but which is quite exciting.

I always make the business case for sustainability. It’s so compelling. Our costs are down, not up. Our products are the best they have ever been. Our people are motivated by a shared higher purpose — esprit de corps to die for. And the goodwill in the marketplace — it’s just been astonishing.