Coming up roses

Sustainable? What’s in a name? Peter Malaise of Ecover looks for its real meaning in a coherent vision for consumers as well as producers.

Sustainable development, sustainable raw materials, sustainable energy, sustainable society, sustainable production, sustainable agriculture…. Sticking ‘sustainable’ in front of everything may be the latest trend, but the thing behind the word retains its own characteristics whatever name we gave it. Language is just convention, after all. As Shakespeare tells us, "That, which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet."

The converse is equally true; if a ‘glog’ or a 'drool' is something with ugly characteristics, it won’t help to call it a rose. Unfortunately, many business people forget their Shakespeare and make exactly this mistake. A company, a product, a service is not necessarily improved by adding 'sustainable' to its name.

It was Gro Brundtland’s famous 1987 report, Our Common Future, that spread the word. The first to recognise and pick up the idea had been part of the hippie generation, people who’d been in their twenties in 1968 - but, unfortunately, next to none of whom then became captains of industry. And it wasn’t until the decade after Brundtland that a more general consciousness of sustainability began to awaken, through diverse initiatives in which - amazingly enough - it was often public services that took the lead. Only in the last couple of years have we seen some small and large companies starting programmes to incorporate sustainability in their day-to-day business practice.

It would be a fundamental misjudgement to treat this as just another passing trend. It’s here to stay - but sustainability still needs to be taken far more seriously than it is today, and applied throughout the economy as a perfectly sound way of dealing with reality.

That won’t just mean putting the word in front of everything. You’ll be scrutinised not only on the efficiency of your product or service, but also on what it is made from, where, how and in what conditions, the after-effects of using it, and so on. And it will be far easier to provide all this information proactively, and make it part of your daily business, than to proceed in ignorance and then undergo a painful process of exposure that forces you to cough up inconsistent information time and again. It won’t help, either, to keep happily babbling away about profit, people and planet (profit up front, of course), as if it were that easy. Things won’t change when just their names change.

There’s another dimension of sustainability, too, which we need to bring into the broad light of day and that’s sustainable consumption. There are some consumers who will squeeze out every last detail from the producer about their products, criticise them, and ultimately not buy them for some whimsical reason or another - but if you could examine that consumer’s daily behaviour, you would find a really inconsistent pattern. People who happily wear acrylic fabrics, made from petrochemical ingredients that they won’t tolerate in their washing powder. Die-hards who walk around in wool and silk, but don’t care about what they eat or use to do the dishes. And others, highly sensitive to animal welfare, who openly advocate the alternatives of acrylic fur and nylon shoe soles - making no connection between these petrol derivatives, and the damage caused by an oil spill to birds and marine life.

We have to develop more coherent vision as consumers. Just as a producer can’t be socially kosher, economically uninterested and ecologically a disaster, but has to work on all three fronts to be sustainable, can’t people take a wider set of criteria on board when they go shopping? We can’t expect millions of threefold saints, just that people try to use sustainability as a kind of compass when fulfilling all their consumer needs. Do I know who makes this product and what they stand for? Shall I choose something comparable from a different supplier, if this one doesn’t give me the transparency I’m expecting? The commitment is more important than getting it right down to the last nut and bolt.

Genuine sustainable producers will only encourage this. For some of them it will be a way out of marginalisation, and for most it will mean a more stable market based on healthy principles, not just the get-the-lowest-price thing. When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. What’s in a name?

Peter Malaise is concept manager at Ecover

12 October 2003

Peter Malaise