Every time a new fad hits the threshold of zeitgeist, you are guaranteed a slew of earnest articles trying to find a Sustainability angle. I remember being solemnly told “You won’t achieve Sustainability without mindfulness” (whyever not?), some very tenuous attempts to identify opportunities for blockchain in Sustainability (if the stats are correct, blockchain is very damaging in terms of the processing energy it soaks up), and who could forget ‘endosymbiotic thrivability’? Everybody, it seems.

Of course the big thing at the minute is AI, which while impressive, much of it hasn’t quite escaped ‘uncanny valley’ for me just yet. There are definitely AI applications in Sustainability, for example putting the ‘smart’ into smart grid, but I still find myself scrolling past a huge amount of unconvincing waffle about compiling Sustainability reports.

But what about the opposite? What about those great ideas which have faded away? Here are three I still hold a flame for:

Industrial Symbiosis: in 2003, I stumbled on some WBCSD projects involving something called Industrial Symbiosis – the idea of one industry’s waste being seen as the raw material for another. Liking what I saw, I got hold of some regional development funding and launched the Tees Valley Industrial Symbiosis Project which surprised me with its success in matchmaking producers of ‘waste’ (we banned the ‘w’ word, a big success factor) with potential users of that resource. This project was later became the NE England branch of the National Industrial Symbiosis Project where our brilliant team delivered a disproportionate proportion of the national outcomes, diverting 100,000s tonnes of material per annum away from landfill and into productive uses – with some colossal carbon savings to boot. Unfortunately, the concept really does require public funding of some sort to maintain the ‘honest broker’ status of the facilitators and there isn’t so much of that around anymore.

Creating Shared Value (CSV): this is the idea that investing either in the market or the supply chain would improve results for all, aka ‘grow the pie’. So if Nike invests in promoting active lifestyles, the market for sportswear expands and population health improves – everybody wins. On a Sustainability side, this kind of thinking can help accelerate the maturation of supply chains. A great example is Tesla allowing competitors to use its EV intellectual property royalty-free, rightly sensing that their main competitor was internal combustion engine cars, not other EVs. Sharing IP means increasing demand for novel components, pushing up quality and driving down costs. While there are still some adherents, CSV as a concept seems to have faded from view when it has so much more to give.

Backcasting: When I read The Natural Step for Business by Brian Nattrass and Mary Altomare about the eponymous Swedish Sustainability programme, one idea stood out: backcasting. The idea is very simple – you visualise what your end goal will look like, ie your business if it achieved Sustainability, and work backwards to the present day to determine the steps required top get there. Backcasting makes it makes it much more likely you will hit your target as you get a much better understanding of where it is, it forces people to think in step changes rather than in incremental moves, and it is perfect for co-creation with key decision makers gaining automatic buy in. I even use a stripped back version at the end of every Net Zero Business Academy session to turn concept into an action plan. I ❤️ backcasting, but I seem to be one of very few active practitioners.

So, those are my nominations for great Sustainability ideas in need of resuscitation, do you have any more?