Doing Your Part to Make Our Work Sustainable
As the years pass, we become more and more concerned about the condition of our planet. We look to ways to make our world sustainable. But understanding what sustainability means has become a bit convoluted.
What is Sustainability?
You could ask a dozen people to define sustainability. Some won’t know how to put it into words and the rest will give you different definitions of what it means to them. According to Webster’s Dictionary, sustainable means “able to be used without being completely used up or destroyed”, “involving methods that do not completely use up or destroy natural resources”, or “able to last or continue for a long time”. In other words, sustainability means finding resources we can use today without using up what tomorrow will need.
What Does Sustainability Mean to You?
It is all good and well that sustainability looks to save the earth so future generations will have what they need as well, but what does this mean for you and your utility or municipality. The answer is simple: everything!
We all live on this planet. We all take from it in some way shape or form. But we seldom think about what it means for future generations. What will our grand-kids have left? Or our grand-kids’ grand-kids. Stopping and thinking about this allows us to prepare for the future when we’re gone so that our future generations are left out in the cold, so to speak. Making Sustainability Financially Feasible The truth of the matter, it isn’t as simple as just waking up and deciding to do everything in a sustainable manner. Making these changes costs money. We can talk about sustainability until we’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t mean we have a clear cut solution on how to implement this throughout the world.
Proper planning and budgeting is the first step. Look at your day-to-day dealings. Look to see where we can use resources, or contractors that use resources that are sustainable. Look to see where budgets can be shuffled to make room for a sustainable lifestyle. And then implement these changes over time.
This all goes back to one thing: Asset Management. Working with your Asset Management plan, you can make sustainability a reality for you. Knowing that changes need to be made, you can use your Asset Management plan to determine the course of action that best suits your needs.
Conclusion
While it is the policy makers, the politicians, and the public officials that make the rules that we live by, we can all do our part to make this earth last. As a utility or municipality, when you choose to use sustainable resources, you are showing your community that you are doing your part to make tomorrow as bright as today.
When planning your projects or looking for resources for your utility or municipality, taking sustainability into consideration allows you to look out for those generations that aren’t here yet to stand up for themselves.
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