The many definitions of “sustainability”

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but there has been a lot of thinking in the background. One topic that seems to be recurring in many aspects of my life all revolves around the word “sustainability”. Problem is, we all seem to have our own definition of what that means. In the USGBC Colorado Metropolitan Branch Speakers Bureau presentation I helped put together, it obviously leans towards the “environmental” meaning of “sustainability”. This seems to be what more and more folks think, but most companies aren’t interested in environmental sustainability if it impacts their financial sustainability. Last night I attended a board meeting for City Park Alliance (a non-profit focused on improving Denver’s City Park and restoring it to the gem it once was). We invited board members from the other Denver Park Advocacy groups to attend as well so we could share ideas. The Executive Director for Civic Center Conservancy talked about all the wonderful programming events they put on in Civic Center Park, but that they had to also focus on how those events could be sustainable (aka bring in money so they could continue to do them year after year). I think many smaller non-profits struggle with recognizing that often times even though we are executing our mission, we need to be considering how we keep ourselves funded to continue to execute that mission.

Companies have to worry about the same thing. It’s important for companies to focus on how they can continue to keep their company alive (and growing). However, if a company has a natural resource they are tapping into, they need to consider the lifespan of that resource both for the environmental reasons of it not being there, but also on what their company’s impact will be if they use it up.

In my job, we met with many companies who weren’t really interested in the environmental sustainability side of their data center, however when you told them that by just turning up the temperature in their data center (which wouldn’t impact the equipment they had in a negative way), they could add more cooling capacity and therefore be able to accomodate their future IT growth, they perked up. Environmentally, it still had a positive impact (no extra data center to be built, no more CRAC units needed to be added, etc), but we could speak the language they understood which impacted their company’s bottom line.

I think it’s important when talking about the ROI of any kind of capital expense, it’s best to talk about the sustainability of those changes, both environmentally and financially. Heck, feel free to even throw in the PR aspects as well. But by speaking about sustainability from many aspects, the end result is sure to speak to many people.

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