Many businesses worldwide have been accused of breaking environmental regulations. Some factories release waste with toxins into rivers, air, and landfills, causing pollution. Such behaviors significantly impact the ecosystem and threaten the survival of humans, fish, trees, and wild animals. Environmentalists around the world call for governments’ support in the efforts toward environmental conservation. One approach adopted by agencies and institutions is sustainability, which has its foundation in decreasing severe environmental effects by reducing waste production and regulating raw materials (Horng et al., 2017). Organizations play a crucial role in society through the provision of goods and services, meaning their environmental sustainability efforts could go a long way in educating the masses to adopt conservation measures.
Sustainability strategies often indicate that businesses should change some of their production processes to reduce waste. Therefore, institutions make small to radical innovations to integrate sustainability into business (Franceschelli et al., 2018). Business model innovation for sustainability is open to different interpretations in various industries, but it generally indicates the change in technology, operating procedures, processes, thinking, and practices. This means adopting environmentally-friendly raw materials, building plants in compliance with recommended standards, adopting reliable and efficient distribution channels, and engaging in ecological conservation campaigns through corporate social responsibility.
Customers show great concern for conservation practices and are choosing to buy more from sustainable businesses. As a result, organizations have adopted various innovative sustainable practices to compete favorably in a volatile market. One such innovative practice is sustainable packaging logistics, which integrates packaging design, logistics management, and new product development (GarcĂa-Arca et al., 2017). The packaging is designed to protect a product while in transit and during handling as well as enhance promotion. Many wrappings used in packaging end up as waste, thereby damaging the environment. As a result, companies came up with environmentally sensitive packaging designs intended to reduce waste and raw material consumption through the introduction of returnable/recyclable packaging (GarcĂa-Arca et al., 2017). Such strategies enable companies to reduce production and distribution costs while increasing sales by being eco-friendly. Maziriri (2020) noted green packaging (eco-friendly) lowered damages during shipping from 12% to 1%, thus boosting customers’ confidence in products. Business performance increases when packages are labeled as eco-friendly due to growth in sales.
The fashion industry is a resource-intensive area, which leads to the production of much waste. An article by Niinimäki et al. (2020) reveals fashion sector is responsible for 8-10% of the total carbon dioxide waste per year, or 4-5 billion tons. It also leads to the consumption of over 79 trillion liters of water annually, 190,000 tons of oceanic waste, and over 92 million tons of textile waste, most of which ends up in landfills (Niinimäki et al., 2020). The detrimental impacts of textile production required a transition into an eco-friendlier business model. Consequently, H&M partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to create a new circular economy aimed to promote zero waste and recycling (Todeschini et al., 2017). The model calls for upcycling, an approach where waste materials are used to generate new products. For instance, low-quality products or raw materials are combined to manufacture high-quality garments with a longer lifespan.
Recycling is also recommended under a circular economy, where raw materials in the fashion industry are acquired from recycled waste. Significant examples of fashion companies using recycled products include Adidas and Parley which develop sneakers using plastic recovered from the ocean (Todeschini et al., 2017). Other brands such as Calvin Klein, Patagonia, Rent the Runway, People Tree, Stella McCartney, Indigenous, and Thought have taken a step forward in using recycled waste to conserve the environment (Khandual & Pradhan, 2019). These brands also liaise with conservation agencies to plant trees as a method of appealing to the consumers.
There are several ways in which companies pursue and gain value creation. First, data engineering enables businesses to collect information from multiple sources. The information collected is analyzed using different approaches to reveal key trends and market patterns in sustainability (Bradley et al., 2017). A finished product undergoes multiple stages such as sourcing raw materials and distribution, cleaning, processing, as well as supplying to the final customer. These phases generate structured and unstructured data, which offers valuable insights once analyzed. As a result, the big data analytics approach is applied to help companies create cost-effective product designs, improve manufacturing efficiency, and meet environmental sustainability standards. For instance, Tao and Yu (2018) explored how high-value engineering is used to simulate the life cycle of a product. Such experiments help businesses reduce harmful environmental impacts by developing resilient products with a longer life cycle. Therefore, businesses implement engineering and technological innovations to create quality eco-friendly products.
There are several issues linked to sustainable environment conservation strategies. Determining the success of the steps taken to conserve the environment begins with the identification of areas to prioritize. Identifying priorities enables them to create a map and comprehensive assessment of measures to take to minimize severe impacts. However, Sonter et al. (2018) noted one issue as a lack of scientific studies capturing the full extent of environmental degradation. For instance, researchers only measure the direct impacts of mining, ignoring broader and long-term consequences. As a result of shallow experiments, the approaches adopted to protect biodiversity fail to provide measurable outcomes. Therefore, determining the sustainability of adopted mechanisms is a key issue that needs to be investigated.
Additionally, governments are keen on developing policies aimed at tracking the status of environmental degradation. However, Howes et al. (2019) argued that decades of environmental monitoring reveal no environment is getting worse, and this failure is attributed to a lack of policy implementation. The key challenges in creating policies include incomplete specifications, conflicting objectives, incentive failures, and limited competencies for the agencies tasked with implementation. People required to create regulations and directives for environmental conservation might be lacking proper knowledge of the problem leading to the creation of inappropriate and inefficient policies (Howes et al., 2019). Bio-diversity is multi-dimensional with different events relationships, and the environment, which becomes an issue because there is no single recognized approach to measure sustainability.
In conclusion, human activities create a strain on readily available natural resources, which leads to conservation issues if these materials are not monitored or managed well. Businesses lead to environmental pollution through poor waste disposal strategies. When released into the environment, these toxins affect humans and animals, which led to improved consumer awareness of the green economy. This paper shows people are likely to consume products from companies engaging in sustainable practices. Therefore, organizations have adopted different strategies aimed at restoring the environment, such as recycling, upcycling, and investing in technology to understand the product life cycle. These measures facilitate conservation efforts, but there is still much to be done to meet a sustainable environment.
References
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