According to most dictionaries, something is sustainable if you can continue to do it for the foreseeable future. The Brundtland Commission definition explicitly includes consideration of meeting the needs of the present without reducing future generations to meet their own needs.
In order for an activity to be truly sustainable, it has to not significantly degrade the environment around it, or the people affected by it. It also has to generate enough profit to allow the activity to continue. Environmental sustainability is very important for any activity, but “if it’s not profitable, it’s not sustainable.”
Your coffee shop may decide to buy napkins made from organically grown hemp. If they don’t cost much more than the previous kind you bought, and if your customers are going to notice and think it’s cool, and they get their friends to start coming, that was a win-win, as they say. But if nobody notices or cares and they cost a lot more, that wasn’t really a sustainable decision, because it reduced your company’s ability to stay in business.
Over the last 150 years, there has been a slow but significant shift in how much environmental degradation people were willing to tolerate. Long ago, when rivers caught fire, people decided enough was enough, and it was time to make some changes as to what was and was not allowed to go into the river. Now, we have much, much tighter regulations on how much of what is acceptable to be put into the water supply or the air supply.
Over time, we have gradually learned how to keep things out of our environment, and figured out how to do it for costs that were not extreme. Over time, the cost of prevention has gone down, and the standards for what has to be prevented have gone up. Neither environmentalists nor polluters have been happy about the pace of these changes, but that’s the way these things go.
Because I’m a supply chain person, interested in Sustainability, so that’s what you’ll find around here: things about Sustainability, things about Supply Chains, and sometimes things about both.