Supply Chain Sustainability—Drivers, Inhibitors, Solutions - Technology Management for Sustainable Production and Logistics - page 60

Flow of time

Higher
environmental
impacts

Lower production
cost per unit

Higher
efficiency

Lower
market price

Higher
consumption

Fig. 1 The increase in overall environmental impact of efficiency gains (Wackernagel and Rees 1996 )

increasing efficiency are shown in Fig. 1 . Due to this conception, higher efficiency
leads to increasing consumption, which increases the overall use of resources.
Because of that, environmental concerns must go beyond mere efficiency gains.
All these arguments lead to more active attitude of establishment in question of
sustainability.

3 Socio-political Aspects of Sustainability—Attitude
of Contemporary Society and Policy Makers

While most business practices concern private profits, environmental protection is
strongly recognized as a public good (Orsato 2006 ). There is an inter-dependence
between the economic, the social and ecological sphere. The economy belongs to
a society, which itself belongs to the natural environment. The balance between
them may allow on sustainable growth and welfare. The inter-dependence between
the environment, society and economy makes each sphere has an evident impact
on the others. For example, the environment may harm the economy and society
through natural disasters, while society may harm the environment realizing
destructive investments, like rivers' regulations in Russia or China. Economic
activity may also damage the environment with industrial pollution, may lead to
depletion of natural resources. Sustainability is therefore the need to respect the
three “Ps”—planet, people and profit (Kleindorfer et al. 2005 ). The conditions
for a sustainable society have been defined by Daly ( 1990 ) and Meadows et al.
( 1992 ). They described rules for a sustainable society:

1. Society's rates of use of renewable resources do not exceed their rates of
regeneration.
2. Society's rates of use of non-renewable resources do not exceed the rate at
which sustainable renewable resources are developed.
3. Society's rates of pollutant emission do not exceed the assimilative capacity of
the environment.