Choosing Between Two Evils

Part of the problem is that recycling is merely an aspirin, alleviating the symptoms of waste but not the problem of mass consumption and the associated supplies for products. Robert Shapiro, CEO and chairman of Monsanto, voiced his recognition of the problem of supply when he said, "What we thought was boundless has limits, and we are beginning to hit them."

Since the Industrial Revolution, when factories were destructive, polluting, dark and dingy, we have tried to be less destructive. Controls were put into place to prevent immediate sickness and death, and ever since then our approach has been one of doing "less bad". That approach evolved into the environmental movement of fighting toxic waste, pollution, diminishing resources and the decline of wilderness.

Eco-efficiency, a strategy used by Henry Ford to have lean and clean operating policies, resurfaced after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Eco-efficiency means doing more with less. The term itself was coined by the Business Council for Sustainable Development, then consisting of 48 industrial sponsors including Dow, Du Pont, Conagra, and Chevron, who brought a business perspective to the Earth Summit. The Council�s perspective, shared in a report timed for simultaneous release with the Summit, was to focus on what business has to gain from a new ecological awareness versus what the environment stands to lose if industry continues with its current patterns. Stephan Schmidheiney, a founder of the Council, predicted in the report that businesses lacking an eco-efficiency focus wouldn�t be competitive within a decade. He further opined that adding more value to goods and services, while using fewer resources and releasing less pollution, was the wave of the future and the path to success.

Let's look at the 4Rs - reduce, reuse, recycle, and regulate, the basic tenets of the environmental movement and eco-efficiency. How do they fit into this discussion? Reducing product consumption, toxic emissions, and oil consumption are good goals, but they don't stop resource depletion and destruction. Buying fewer products helps, but the products you do buy still consume precious resources, in today's approach to industry. Releasing toxins in reduced amounts still harms the environment and people. And reducing oil consumption only means stretching out the inevitable depletion of oil.

Reusing is another way of reducing consumption, at least that's how it seems so on the surface because the piles have "gone away". But often the re-manufacturing of products causes the toxins and pollutants to be moved to other areas before being released into the environment, not eliminated.

Recycling is also called downcycling because the re-manufactured products tend to be of lesser quality than virgin manufactured products. And in some cases, when making products from recycled content, chemicals or minerals have to be added to improve quality so the resulting product has the desired qualities. Fabric made of recycled plastic bottles isn�t the environmental plus people think; the fibers contain toxins that weren�t meant to be worn next to human skin.

Regulation isn't necessarily the answer to alleviating our waste problems. Regulation can be increase costs because it can force products to have more lives than they were intended. Sometimes the additional handling introduces costs that weren�t anticipated when the legislation was written. Toxins are merely delayed, not stopped from entering, the environment.

The 4 Rs may help the situation but don't halt depletion, destruction, or pollution; they only move it around and slow it down. A better way to think about waste is to just create less of it. A better way to think about production is to create items that don't deplete, destruct, pollute, or harm.

Efficiency has been viewed as good, but in reality, it's good only if all components in the product are good. Here are some examples where efficiency has caused problems because all components weren't good.
* efficient houses - sick houses have resulted, or weak ones that don�t withstand time or earthquakes
* efficient factories - distribute pollutants elsewhere
* efficient agriculture - deplete local landscapes and wildlife

Another point, often overlooked in such discussions, is that efficiency isn't always fun because beauty, creativity, enjoyment, fantasy, inspiration, and poetry fall by the wayside. Why take the fun out of life?

Efficiency, when implemented within a larger effective system intending overall positive effects on a wide range of issues - not just economic ones - can actually be valuable. It's also valuable as part of transitional strategies. But when industry is geared towards destruction, efficiency - attempting less bad - is fatal.

Your action, as hospitality operators, is to continue conserving resources, to buy products from companies that are striving to change their operating paradigms to create more environmentally sensitive products, and to encourage your clients and guests to do the same. Be efficient in the long-run, not just the short-term with decisions you make on construction, renovation, and FF&E purchases.

It's time to focus on what to do, not what not to do. It's time to have another option to choose.

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A review of the chapter, Why Doing "Less Ba"� Isn't No Good , from "Cradle to Cradle", a book by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, on Remaking the Way We Make Things -- with additional comments for how the hospitality industry can use the information.