This is a UN story. Even their story, meant to be positive, it is not. As they say:
"However, there is still a long way to and there is even evidence that the world is going backwards: the 2021 Circularity Gap Report, produced annually by the Circle Economy thinktank, estimates that the global circularity rate (the proportion of recovered materials, as a percentage of overall materials used) stands at only 8.6 per cent, down from 9.1 per cent in 2018"
Thinking that you can create sustainable businesses, it is like trying to make the water dry. You cannot. The goal of a business is to keep on making profits, else it cannot sustain itself.
Think about the following:
You have a hiking shoes company. You make boots for the people who want to hike. You employ 100 people or so, to design and produce them. You want to make really great hiking boots and make your business as sustainable as possible. How can you do that? Well, you cannot.
Three reasons why:
1. The chain of trades is wide and complicated in today's society. The raw materials used can come from other parts of the world that you cannot control or oversee. And a lot of materials go into such boots. Here's an example. So the production can be spread across the world, employing slaves, creating waste, pollution, and such. Things you cannot, again, oversee or control.
2. You have to compete with others and that means you are forced to lower your prices. If Amazon, or others, are playing "dirty" (unsustainable) and because of that they can have much lower prices, then very likely you are out of the business. So you are forced to cut corners and maybe lie, deceive, exaggerate about your hiking boots, to keep yourself afloat (to keep on selling them). You will have to invest into ads and marketing, and find cheaper producers/distributors for your boots.
3. The most important and easy to grasp issue: YOU HAVE TO KEEP ON SELLING HIKING BOOTS!
Look, if you are selling something (say hiking boots), you cannot afford to say: "Oh, we made enough of them...seems like most people have hiking boots. And we've also made them of such a good quality that they need no replacement - we don't have to produce new models. Let's stop producing more to not contribute to a potential waste of resources.". You cannot say that. If you say that you also say "Lets fire all of our 100 employees and lose our financial income and suffer because of that." It is that simple!
There is no such thing as a sustainable business, simply because a business NEEDS to keep on producing the shit they are making, endlessly! Else they cannot survive! Couple that with the fact that they have to compete (price wise) with other businesses + the fact that there is usually a huge chain of trades in order to produce any good/service (and you cannot control those), then it surely must mean that trying to make a sustainable business it is like trying to dry the water.
Humans have to take their heads out of their butts, and accept that we cannot keep on living in a trade-based society while trying to fix the problems created by the trade-based society. We need to start providing trade-free goods and services, at least when it comes to the basic needs, for most humans. To decouple them from this rat-trade-race, little by little. #tromimg
