less bad isn’t good enough
Sure, folks who bought the Prius want credit for ‘doing something,’ and why not?
As they hurtle over the cliff with the rest of us lemmings, they can say at least they did something.
And sure, making industry less unsustainable is a good thang.
Yet, it doesn’t mean squat unless the planet’s entire industrial apparatus is sustainable.
Not sorta, kinda, virtually sustainable. Sustainable, period.
So, from this perspective, it seems reasonable to wonder about the relation between our goals and our indicators of progress.
IMHO, it makes little sense to congratulate ourselves if our mileage jumps from 30 to 50 when what we need is the equivalent of 300mpg.
And, let’s face it, the best prospects for getting to those ‘order-of-magnitude-better’ solutions is on the product design side.
We urgently need something like zero footprint production.
So says a network of leading industrial ecologists, meeting in the Euro Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production. As far as they’re concerned, best practices involve ‘zero emission‘ techniques and systems (ZETS).
This is an international forum for the exchange of information about and research into technologies, concepts and policies designed to help ensure progress towards sustainable societies.
Cleaner production goes beyond simple pollution control and involves active research and development into new processes, materials and products that are more resource- and energy-efficient.
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