Sustainable consumption and scientific research

Excerpt

In the recent past I had the opportunity of participating in three conferences, each of which was sustainability-focused with an engineering orientation. As is typical these days, sustainability discussion always begins with unsustainability of consumption in contrast to declining natural resources. Engineering research community has responded with the idea of dematerialization, which is first and foremost an attempt to decouple economic growth, such as increase in gross domestic product (GDP), from adverse environmental impact. This has been shown in some cases to have already been achieved partially; however, the goal remains to be full decoupling. Secondarily, dematerialization is directed towards reducing use of limited natural resources to satisfy the growing functional need of consumption. Dematerialization, while providing a useful idea towards efficient resource use, does not guarantee less consumption per capita. Great innovations in the future can be expected to come from scientific and engineering research to meet the decoupling objective. …