Sustainable development

Sustainable development
• Sustainable development is the organizing principle for meeting
human development goals while simultaneously sustaining the ability
of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem
services based upon which the economy and society depend.
• The desired result is a state of society where living conditions and
resources are used to continue to meet human needs without
undermining the integrity and stability of the natural system.
• Sustainable development can be defined as development that meets
the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs.
• This implies that we need to look after our planet, our resources and
our people to ensure that we can live in a sustainable manner and that
we can hand down our planet to our children and our grandchildren to
live in true sustainability.
 
• It has three main pillars:
 Economic,
 Environmental, and
 Social

These three pillars are informally referred to as people, planet and profits.
The three pillars of sustainability
• The definition of sustainability may be taken further and it is widely accepted that
to achieve sustainability we must balance economic, environmental and social
factors in equal harmony. This may be illustrated with a sustainability Venn
diagram, as shown below:
Social Sustainability
• Social Sustainability is the ability of a social system, such as a country,
family, or organization, to function at a defined level of social well-being
and harmony indefinitely.
• The social aspect of sustainability focuses on balancing the needs of the
individual with the needs of the group
Market-specific skills training programs, sustainable agriculture and food
donations, worker safety initiatives, and women empowerment initiatives
Addressing the community impacts arising as a result of their operations
including water scarcity, health and wellness of communities around their
factories, and land management that honors usage rights of local people
The company is also spearheading the introduction of energy-saving
technologies to schools, medical clinics, and senior living facilities.
Economic Sustainability
• Economic sustainable is the ability of an economy to support a
defined level of economic production indefinitely.
• It requires that a business or country uses its resources efficiently and
responsibly so that it can operate in a sustainable manner to
consistently produce an operational profit.
• Without an operational profit a business cannot sustain it's activities
and also without acting responsibly and using its resources efficiently
a company will not be able to sustain it's activities in the long term.
Environmental Sustainability
• Environmental Sustainability means that we are living within the
means of our natural resources. To live in true environmental
sustainability we need to ensure that we are consuming our natural
resources, such as materials, energy fuels, land, water...etc, at a
sustainable rate.
• Some resources are more abundant than others and therefore we
need to consider material scarcity, the damage to environment from
extraction of these materials and if the resource can be kept within
Circular Economy principles.
• Environmental sustainability should not be confused with full
sustainability, which also need to balance economic and social factors.
• Environmental sustainability occurs when processes, systems and
activities reduce the environmental impact of an organizations
facilities, products and operations
For renewable resources, the rate of harvest should not exceed the
rate of regeneration
For pollution, the rates of waste generation from projects should not
exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment
For nonrenewable resources, the depletion of the nonrenewable
resources should require comparable development of renewable
substitutes for that resource
• Taking these three pillars of sustainability further if we only achieve
two out of three pillars then we end up with:

Social + Economic Sustainability = Equitable

Social + Environmental Sustainability = liveablity
Economic + Environmental Sustainability = Eco-efficiency
Economic + Social + Environmental = Sustainability
• Only through three pillars balancing can we achieve true sustainability
and a truly circular economy.
• The nice thing about taking a total approach to sustainability is that if
you focus on social and environmental issues, profitability will often
follow.
• Social initiatives have an impact on consumer behavior and employee
performance, while environmental initiatives such as energy efficiency
and pollution mitigation can have a direct impact on reducing waste.
• Economic sustainability involves making sure the business makes a
profit, but also that business operations don’t create social or
environmental issues that would harm the long-term success of the
company.
Lifecycle
Life cycle thinking (LCT)
• Life cycle thinking is an approach to becoming mindful of how everyday life affects
the environment. This approach evaluates how both consuming products and
engaging in activities impacts the environment but it not only evaluates them at
one single step, but takes a holistic picture of an entire product or activity system.

• This means when talking about a product and taking a life cycle thinking approach,
what is actually being evaluated is the impact of the activity of consuming that
product. This is because by consuming a product, a series of associated activities
are required to make it happen.
• For example, the raw material extraction, material processing, transportation,
distribution, consumption, reuse/recycling, and disposal must all be considered
when evaluating the environmental impact. This is called the life cycle of a product.
• The overall idea of making a holistic evaluation of a system's effect can be defined
as life cycle thinking.
• LCT is about going beyond the traditional focus on production site and
manufacturing processes to include environmental, social and
economic impacts of a product over its entire life cycle.
• In each life cycle stage there is the potential to reduce resource
consumption and improve the performance of products.
 Approaches to life cycle thinking
• There are many different approaches to life cycle thinking that all involve
looking at life cycle-generated impacts and ways to minimize these
impacts.
• An important component to life cycle approaches is avoiding burden
shifting, in other words, ensuring that improvements in one stage are not
achieved at the expense of another stage.
• Approaches of impact measurement focus on decreasing environmental
impact and resource use throughout all stages of a process.
Commonly used approaches to life cycle thinking
Life-cycle Assessment (LCA)
Life-cycle Management (LCM)
Life-cycle cost (LCC)
 Lifecycle assessment (LCA)
• LCA is an environmental management tool increasingly used to predict and compare the
environmental impacts of a product or service.
• The technique used to assess or examines every stage of the lifecycle, from the mining
of raw materials, through manufacture, packaging, distribution, use, possible re-
use/recycling and then final disposal.
• For each stage, the inputs (in terms of raw materials and energy) and outputs (in terms
of emissions to air, water and as solid waste) are calculated, and these are aggregated
over the lifecycle.
• These inputs and outputs are then converted into their effects on the environment, i.e.
their environmental impacts.
• The sum of these environmental impacts then represents the overall environmental effect
of the lifecycle of the product or service.
• LCA has become one of the most widely applied
scientific and industrial methods for estimating environmental impacts of products and
services
Life Cycle Management (LCM)
• Life cycle management is a business approach to manage the total life cycle
of products and services.
• It follows the life cycle thinking that businesses, through the activities they
must perform, have environmental, social and economic impacts.
• LCM is used to understand and analyze life cycle stages of products and
services of a business, identify potential economic, social or environmental
risks and opportunities at each stage and create ways to act upon those
opportunities and reduce potential risks.

Life Cycle Costing (LCC)

• Life cycle costing (or life cycle cost analysis) is the total cost analysis of a
process or system.
• This includes costs incurred over the life of the system and is frequently
used to find most cost-effective means for providing goods and services.
Goal of Life Cycle Thinking
• The main goals of LCT are to reduce a product’s resource use and emissions to
the environment as well as improve its socio-economic performance through
its life cycle. This may facilitate links between the economic, social and
environmental dimensions within an organization and through its entire value
chain
• The goal of life cycle mapping is to get a more comprehensive understanding
of the entire life of the product and then use this to compare different
functional deliveries for design changes that result in more effective products
that have considered the full life cycle impacts. Get this right, and you are
much closer to designing products that fit within the circular economy.
• In this way companies can achieve cleaner products and process, competitive
advantage in market place and an improved platform to meet the needs of
changing business climate