Denying the ecological debt they have run up by ignoring ecological impact costs for the last 200 hundred years, companies are demanding that changes to their operations in order to lessen their ecological impacts be economically viable.
Eco-efficiency is the 'no-regrets' or 'win-win' response. It involves a series of measures that will both minimise ecological impacts and enhance profitability. Operational reforrms that improve efficiency, reducing energy and resource consumption and waste levels, will impact positively on a company's bottom-line.
This is precisely why ecoefficiency is not sustainable, let alone being a source of sustainments. If a company's profitability increases due to environmental performance improvements, it will either use the extra earnings to expand its operation or disperse the profits amongst its shareholders. In either case, ecoefficiency measures are resourcing increased ecological impacts. In the former case, each individual part of the operation may be more ecoefficient, but the gross impacts of the now larger overall operation will continue to grow. Or in the latter case, the individuals receiving the windfall dividend will be able to afford that extra household appliance, or house extension, or overseas holiday.
By contrast, a sustainment might involve continuously reinvesting the money saved through ecoefficiency measures into more ambitious change programs that would in the end allow a company to become the sustainer of more sustainable lifestyles and workpractices.
It is important to note however that in the end what would need to be changed is our idea of 'efficiency'. In the ecological context of sustainability, a certain type of inefficiency would be appropriate: rather than 'do more with less in less time', an efficient sustainment might involve 'doing different things with less in more time'. Sustainments take time and therefore efficiently waste the excesses fuelling the world's ever-increasing unsustainability.
