Greening of business: A step towards sustainability

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1705
• Author: Lakshmi Viswanathan,George Varghese
• Date: 01 May 2018
• Published date: 01 May 2018

COMMENTARY

Greening of business: A step towards sustainability

Lakshmi Viswanathan |George Varghese

Research Scholar, Institute for Financial

Management and Research, Chennai, India

Correspondence

George Varghese, Research Scholar, Institute

for Financial Management and Research,

Chennai, India.

Email: george.v@ifmr.ac.in

JEL Classification: Q51; Q56; Q57

The rising awareness of consumers regarding the adverse effects of the ever increasing ecological

footprint has given rise to green consumerism. The idea is often encouraged but it can be

enhanced only by a collective effort of consumers, firms, and governments. The article builds

on the existing literature on green consumerism where it is, by and large, misconceived to be uni-

directional—such that the burden of reducing human impressions on ecosystem falls only on the

shoulders of consumers. The study reasons about the need for consumer initiatives to be sup-

ported with relevant policies and regulations from the government and through socially respon-

sible corporate actions.

The authors explore multiple dimensions of green consumerism and analyze in detail the scope

and reach of green business practices in our ongoing strive to sustainability. The article highlights

the actions required from the firms to make use of the opportunities provided by green consum-

erist ideas and the evolving consumer base. It explores the ways in which a business can adopt to

become socially responsible by reaching green consumers. The article further identifies the need

and impact of green marketing for eco‐friendly products, to penetrate to the expanding consumer

base.

“The principal defect of industrial way of life with its ethos of expan-

sion is that it is not sustainable. Its termination within the lifetime of

some born today is inevitable unless it continues to be sustained for

a while longer by an entrenched minority at the cost of imposing great

suffering on rest of mankind.”

—The Ecologist (1972)

1|INTRODUCTION

The conventional mode of development suggests an expansion of

activities that leads to economic development. It demands to integrate

the local economies with the unrestricted flow of goods and capital.

This model of growth calls for an enhancement in industrialized growth

by making use of the available natural resource base. However, eco-

nomic growth does not always bring expected benefits. The benefits

of development without environmental concern are seldom sustained.

As the rate of development increases so does ecological disasters.

Brown (1972) pointed out that in 1950, when Gross World Product

was over a trillion dollars, ecological catastrophes were few. In 1970,

when Gross World Product nearly tripled, rapid eutrophication of

lakes, oil spills, fish kills, devastating floods arising from deforestation,

and so forth became more frequent. The increasing social inequity

and serious ecological constraints associated with the conventional

development mechanism calls for an alternative model that ensure

sustainability.

Every living organism is a recipient of the benefits of nature. From

a single individual to a whole nation, it has an impact on the balance of

nature as they consume from it. Ecological footprint attempts to esti-

mate the extent of human impact on the earth's ecosystems. As

defined by the pioneers of the concept, Wackernagel and Rees

(1998), ecological footprint measures the amount of biologically pro-

ductive land and sea area a person, a community, a town, a country,

or humanity as a whole uses to produce the resources that it consumes

as well as to absorb the waste human economy generates and com-

pares it against what is available for the same. Thus ecological footprint

represents the critical natural capital requirements of a defined econ-

omy or population in terms of the corresponding biologically produc-

tive areas (Wackernagel et al., 1999). Factors such as population size,

technology use, and ecological productivity attribute to the area of

the footprint. But for most of the highly industrialized regions, the

footprint exceeds what is naturally available (Wackernagel & Rees,

1998). Exhausting the very resources that sustain human life and bio-

diversity at a rate higher than what is required for them to replenish

themselves leads to an ecological overshoot. Thus, overshoot occurs

when the resource regenerating capacity of the ecosystem and its abil-

ity to absorb carbon dioxide emissions is exceeded by the human

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the

public, commercial, or not‐for‐profit sectors.

Received: 10 January 2018 Accepted: 16 January 2018

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1705

J Public Affairs. 2018;18:e1705.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1705

Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of6