Environmental Sustainability & Life Cycle Assessment

• Environmental Sustainability refers to meeting the demands of people and commerce without diminishing the environment's capacity to provide for future generations.
• Sustainability is a developmental approach that meets present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet their own.
• Businesses are encouraged to develop new strategies for designing, producing, distributing, and consuming goods and services.
• Market prices, energy consumption, environmental respect, regulation, health, and well-being should all be considered.
• Sustainability requires changes in how governments, markets, business organizations, and individuals manage their activities.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental effects of a product or service throughout its entire existence.
• LCA helps one understand the cumulative impact of products purchased and guide companies to reduce their environmental footprint and purchase cost.
• It also helps understand the structure, potential hazards of carcinogens, inputs, processes, and waste that may affect employees, consumers, and the environment.

Cradle-to-Cradle Design

• Cradle-to-Cradle design involves closed-loop systems where product components are recycled and reused.

Tools for Measuring Sustainability

• The United Nations Global Compact is a voluntary reporting system for businesses.
• It addresses critical areas like human rights, labor, the environment, and anti-corruption.
• The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) provides a framework for sustainability reporting among stakeholders.
• GRI guidelines help businesses measure and report their environmental impacts, including reporting methods and performance indicators.
• The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is an organization that offers reporting frameworks for greenhouse gas emissions and water usage.
• CDP has partnered with corporations, investors, cities, states, and regions to develop reporting frameworks.
• The frameworks encompass major standards for carbon emissions reporting.
• Carbon Footprinting measures the volume of greenhouse gas emissions from a product's manufacture and use.
• Water Footprint measures the amount of water used in a product's manufacture and use.

Characteristics of Environmentally Sustainable Businesses

• Environmentally Sustainable Businesses recognize resource limitations, they manage system interdependence, and recognize the need for supply chain equity.

Stakeholder Model for Sustainable Business

• Stakeholder theory involves understanding how a business operates while considering all identifiable interest holders.
• This model drives businesses to discuss core values and principles with a broad group of stakeholders.
• It encourages managers to articulate their business goals clearly.
• It considers the relationships businesses want to create with stakeholders to achieve their objectives
• This leads to a public discussion about the business's responsibility to all stakeholders.

Geography and Natural Capital

• Natural capital includes natural resources like air, land, and water, which provide essential goods and services.
• Topography refers to the surface features of a region.
• Physical features contribute to a nation's natural capital, including mountains, deserts, rainforests, and bodies of water.
• Geographic features like mountains can isolate populations, dividing nations into smaller markets with distinct cultures, languages, industries, and climates.
• Deserts and tropical forests can also act as barriers to the movement of people, goods, and ideas, whereas bodies of water tend to connect people.

Natural Resources

• Natural resources are anything supplied by nature on which people depend.
• Renewable energy comes from naturally replenished sources like sunlight, wind, and water flow, including wind power, biomass fuels, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal power, geothermal power, ocean energy, and hydropower.
• Nonrenewable energy comes from sources that cannot be replenished, like fossil fuels, petroleum, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power.
• Shale is a fissile rock composed of laminated layers of claylike, fine-grained sediment.
• Nuclear power was once predicted to decline due to waste storage safety issues and the potential for dangerous accidents.
• Coal is projected to decline as an energy source due to its heavy pollution.
• Natural gas is the cleanest-burning fossil fuel with lower greenhouse gas emissions than oil or coal.
• Wind power, both on land and offshore, is now a mainstream electric energy source.
• Biomass is a category of fuels derived from photosynthesis, where plants convert solar energy into chemical energy.