Jonathan T. Scott is a sustainability expert who has been educating current and future business managers for over 9 years on how their businesses can reduce waste and become more profitable. In the following video, he discusses how every component of sustainability (finance, economics, industry, human behavior, social issues, material sciences, … [continued]
Three years ago, I was introduced to sustainability by Jonathan T. Scott, a teacher at Kozminski University in Warsaw, Poland. Ever since, I have been fascinated by the business facets of the subject: the waste minimization and cost reductions it incurs, the job creation benefits, and the minimization of environmental degradation. One of Scott’s contributions to the field of sustainability is the observance that almost everyone focuses on and discusses the symptoms of waste (resource depletion, environmental degradation, CO2 emissions, job loss, etc) rather than the causes, and that if you want to attract the attention of the business community you have to speak its language (e.g finance) and focus on the cost of the causes.
Carbon may speed up the growth of trees (in the short-term) but certainly not our economy. For many decades, businesses were only functioning in one direction. This will have to change in the coming years, since such a one-way business focus, known as the river economy, is only focused on production of goods and leaving them in the hands of consumers, who throw them away after their product-life has ended. This will become less profitable in the coming years as the cost of natural resources will increase, resulting in higher development costs.
