Sustainability in My Personal Life

Sustainability in my personal life

        Today Sustainability is becoming one of the most popular topics in the world.  “Sustainability is the ability of society to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”^[1] Now increasing number of companies are begun to consider making change in sustainable. Some companies consider the sustainability it because sustainable can earn more profits for their company, but they did not really thinking about how to save the environment. However, there still have a lot of companies have corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility means: “Corporate initiative to assess and take responsibility for the company’s effects on the environment and impact on social welfare.” ^[2] So some corporations believe that company has responsibility to considering sustainable development when they access their business. Most main areas the business needs to consider are environmental, economic and social. (Nicole Fallon Taylor, 2015)^[3] 

For me, I believe that the business’s activities would directly affect the environment. For example, the industry process would produce a huge amount of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, which directly worsens the air quality. If this industry does not considering CSR, they will produce increasing number of greenhouse gas. Personally, I believe that the corporation needs to have their own ethics spontaneous. What is Ethics? Ethics is “values or moral principles.”^[4] So the ethics are different for different people or corporation due to the different education background and different living environment. If the corporation spontaneously have the ethics that they have responsibility to do something to keep the sustainable, and that corporation’s activity would really impact the environment. So I consider that the corporation actually can have conscience. According to the lecture we learn from this class, there is a great law of the Iroquois says: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” ^[5]

If the corporation just consider their own profit and do not consider any other ethics principles that would destroy our world. Today environmental problem is becoming one of the most serious problems in the world. Sea levels are rising. Temperatures are rising. And extreme natural disasters such as storms and hurricanes are occurring. And humans are largely responsible for those results. If the corporation have conscience, then that would help to save the earth. Take H&M as an example. H&M have a program called Garment Collecting. First they will collect all the clothes that we no longer want, and then they can reduce waste and give old products a new life. Those clothes can be worn again, can be reuse it to turned those clothes into other products, such as cleaning cloths. And also can be recycling.^[6] In 2015, over 12000 tons of garments were collected in H&M and more than 20% of those are recycled. In addition, they will invest all the money they earned from this program into social projects. For example, they will invest into research and innovation projects on how to turned old textiles into new fibers. By doing this, in the future they will be able to reduce the clothes waste to 0. ^[7] According to this case, I learned that the corporation must have conscience then they can make change to our environment and our society.

Ethics are exists around my personal life. When I were young, my parents will told us that we must through all the garbage into the garbage bin, we need to save water when we using the water. We need to turn off the light if we don’t use it. When I grow up, I learn those ethics principle from my class, my friends and also from the society. So actually I believe that ethics are around our life. And now, I learn a lot about ethics from my college life. Before take GBL class I just know that today our environment is becoming worsen, but I do not know how should we do to really solve this problem. From this class I learned that how government regulate rule to help the environment. Those rules are included clean water act, clean air act, toxic substance control act, resources conservation and recovery act. When we talking about the sustainability, we will talk about the Triple Bottom Line. TBL have three components: Economic, Environmental, and social equity. A lot of companies are going to analysis this three aspect to keep their sustainability.