We’ve spoken before about the numerous advantages of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in context to environmental and green-energy concerns. Both in terms of present-day abilities and future features, an ERP is able to bring greater savings and a better planet for your business—and your children. Expanding capabilities in ERP software to track the disposition of byproducts and pollutants could certainly lend a hand in tracking a business’s impact on the world and increase an industry’s stewardship of the environment. The consequences of poor stewardship, of course, are not chump change and there’s growing awareness among industry leaders of their responsibilities in this arena. In the past, the arguments against more careful tending of the environment seemed to bypass the notion that everything in a system is connected… and everything has a cost.
ENVIRONMENTAL ENTERPRISES
Today, connectivity as a concept languishes in the minds of marketeers and IT gurus, but the ideas of environmental connectivity have long been stewing, if slow to be heeded. During the 1950s and 60s, biologist Rachel Carson combated the use of the pesticide DDT. Most damning was her 1962 work Silent Spring that revealed that DDT had been found in the livers of mammalian wildlife in areas of the US where no human had traveled for years. Though only in use since after the second world war, DDT had already penetrated into natural systems without any human agent needed. Any sane person would wonder where it had spread into civilized systems. I don’t know about you, but I like my liver.
Our oceans are another system under pressure. With massive trash islands now afloat in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, we can’t pretend that what we do here does not travel afar and well beyond our control. We might comfort ourselves that such problems are distant, but again that ignores the nature of closed systems: everything comes back to haunt you. Small fish are already consuming tiny pieces of trash in the ocean and are in turn consumed by major food fish soon available in your own supermarket and for your own dining pleasure. Setting aside the unpleasantness of opening a fish with bits of actual trash inside the animal, we don’t yet know what chemicals were leeched from the trash in to the tissues of the fish.
In short, the problems of the environment should always be viewed as a personal problem, a local problem, a problem that will have consequences close to home. With manufacturing and other industries always having been a leader in American greatness, it is gratifying to see them rising to lead in protecting an environment that supports our businesses, our families, and our future.
Is your company doing it’s part for the planet? Let us know by leaving a comment, and join us next time when we’ll be discussing how an environmentally conscious company can actually save money as well as the environment.