Throw Sustainability Out the Window

Let’s find some common ground. It is 2015 and if you’re like us, you turn on the news or get on your phone every day, and see how much of the world has gone to shambles. Businesses fighting the government, government fighting the businesses. Politics thrown into it as to who is right and why. Don’t even get me started on taxes. All the while destroying our planet and taking advantage of the middle class. With over 550,000 new business starting a year, their failure rate is insanely high. Cheap costs of labor usually walk hand in hand with quality. Makes sense, you get what you pay for. But why does it have to be that way?

Sustainability is a discussion we have had multiple times. When we first tried launching our own product, it was fueled by really trying to create something for the masses that would promote composting and reduce waste in landfills. The outrage from a small group of individuals honestly took us by surprise. This band of misfits labeled us green washers (a term we had never heard before), and told us we were threatening sustainability by not producing something that was recyclable. Such an interesting concept. We began to realize that sustainability is way more complicated then we first thought.

What we have come to realize, in fact, is that it is so complicated it hurts itself. The movement towards our modern, more sustainable way of living was fueled by the rebellious movement of the 1970’s and America’s post-Vietnam era. All politics aside and fast forwarding 40 years to a culture that was raised in wartime, this 1970’s mindset of “free love” is largely a turn off to most average Americans. The point is, people want to live in a better world and do things ethically, but collectively we are not willing to all become hippies.

So, naturally as designers that work heavily in branding and have a deep seeded passion to create things that are ethical, we have come to a conclusion. Sustainability is so 2000 and late. As a matter of fact, throw it out the window, completely. The word has so many negative connotations attached to it now, which you have got to realize it does more harm than good. We propose a new word with a new brand, same direction, “Responsible”. This word for us was fueled by the triple bottom line, people, planet, & profit. If a product is trying to be better for the environment, then it is being responsible to itself. If a business is trying to push an idea, service, or product to better our world, then it is being responsible to its clients, consumers, and environment.

Do you get what we are saying here? What we are not saying is let’s ruin the planet. What we are saying is let’s change a word to a better one with more positive feelings to reach a larger audience and hit the tipping point in our culture. It is so close that maybe, just maybe this is all it would take. This of course would need an entirely new marketing campaign and somehow, getting some big wig blogger to pump it into the masses, but it would be able to accomplish what sustainability has been unable to do in the last 40 years. Crazy that a word could do that right?

We love this word and internalize here in our own company. It carries over to our clients. We pledge to be responsible in how we deal with them, what we charge, and how we talk about them. We pledge this to our environment, what we produce, and how it can positively affect the environment. And we pledge this to ourselves to create a profitable company because people depend on us now to put bread on their table. My father taught me to always give something back better then when you got it.

This isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the responsible thing to do.