Over the years, as countries and regions around the world began to develop, it slowly became evident that industrialization and economic growth come hand in hand with environmental degradation. Eco-Efficiency has been proposed as one of the main tools to promote a transformation from unsustainable development to one of sustainable development. It is based on the concept of creating more goods and services while using fewer resources and creating less waste and pollution. “It is measured as the ratio between the (added) value of what has been produced and the (added) environment impacts of the product or service .” The term was coined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in its 1992 publication “Changing Course,” and at the 1992 Earth Summit, eco-efficiency was endorsed as a new business concept and means for companies to implement Agenda 21 in the private sector. Ergo the term has become synonymous with a management philosophy geared towards sustainability, combining ecological and economic efficiency.
Environmentally friendly or environment-friendly, are sustainability and marketing terms referring to goods and services, laws, guidelines and policies that claim reduced, minimal, or no harm upon ecosystems or the environment. Companies use these ambiguous terms to promote goods and services, sometimes with additional, more specific certifications, such as ecolabels. Their overuse can be referred to as greenwashing.
William Andrews McDonough is an American architect, designer and author. McDonough is founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, co-founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) as well as co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things and The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance. McDonough's career is focused on creating a beneficial footprint. He espouses a message that we can design materials, systems, companies, products, buildings, and communities that continuously improve over time.
Green brands are those brands that consumers associate with environmental conservation and sustainable business practices.
Eco-Schools is an international programme of the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE) that aims to empower students to be the change our sustainable world needs by engaging them in fun, action-orientated and socially responsible learning.
Green marketing is the marketing of products that are presumed to be environmentally safe. It incorporates a broad range of activities, including product modification, changes to the production process, sustainable packaging, as well as modifying advertising. Yet defining green marketing is not a simple task where several meanings intersect and contradict each other; an example of this will be the existence of varying social, environmental and retail definitions attached to this term. Other similar terms used are environmental marketing and ecological marketing.
Eco-innovation is the development of products and processes that contribute to sustainable development, applying the commercial application of knowledge to elicit direct or indirect ecological improvements. This includes a range of related ideas, from environmentally friendly technological advances to socially acceptable innovative paths towards sustainability. The field of research that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new "ecological" ideas and technology spread is called eco-innovation diffusion.
Sustainable advertising addresses the carbon footprint and other negative environmental and social impacts associated with the production and distribution of advertising materials. A growing number of companies are making a commitment to the reduction of their environmental impact associated with advertising production and distribution.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:
Forward Commitment Procurement (FCP) is a procurement model that is designed to be used to deliver cost effective environmental products and services to the public sector and help to create the market conditions in which the environmental goods and services sector can thrive.
This page is an index of sustainability articles.
Gail Vittori is Co-Director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a non-profit design firm established in 1975 dedicated to sustainable planning, design and demonstration where she has worked since 1979.
Andrew L. Shapiro has been an influential voice on environmental innovation in business for a decade. He has built a career, and a pioneering advisory group, GreenOrder, around the idea that sustainability can be a critical driver of profitable growth.
Environmentally sustainable design is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the sustainability of the world is known as sustainable development.
Sustainability brands are products and services that are branded to signify a special added value in terms of environmental and social benefits to the customer and thus enable the differentiation from competitors.
Sustainability marketing myopia is a term used in sustainability marketing referring to a distortion stemming from the overlooking of socio-environmental attributes of a sustainable product or service at the expenses of customer benefits and values. The idea of sustainability marketing myopia is rooted into conventional marketing myopia theory, as well as green marketing myopia.
Open sustainability innovation is the use of open innovation in the development of sustainable products, services and initiatives. This is an approach to marketing for companies may prove to be advantageous as it is not point of sale based, but rather offers consumers information they have previously never been exposed to. Creating a basis for more long term conversational relationships. As a result of this conversational relationship between companies and consumers ideas about the importance of sustainability and how people relate to this through consumption can arise. By offering an open communication way of marketing to consumers, companies may ultimately gain a competitive advantage based on trust and disclosure. Thus not only will open sustainability innovations promote the use of sustainable products and services, it will actually create a snowballing effect to other companies who will have to adopt new sustainability practices in order to remain on the market.
Hariharan Chandrashekar is an Indian economist who turned to business in the late 1980s. He has presided over projects on water, energy and green buildings for over 25 years.
Seetha Coleman-Kammula is an Indian chemist, environmentalist and entrepreneur. After over 25 years working in the petrochemical industry developing plastics, she began an environmental consulting firm in 2005. Her firm focuses on industrial ecology and assessment of the life cycle of products so that they are manufactured in processes that are environmentally aware of the future impact of waste products.
Leyla Acaroglu is an Australian designer, sustainability innovator, and educator. She is the founder of two design agencies, Disrupt Design and Eco Innovators. She also founded the UnSchool, a pop-up program that disrupts the mainstream way that knowledge is gained and shared; the program won the Core77 Design Education Initiative Award.
