Generaly, the arguments about investiments or programs of organizational sustanability emphasize that invest in organizational sustainability increases costs. But with the economy, the costs should not to reduce?
It depends: do you look short term or long term?
Short term, nearly all additional environmental measures costs money (otherwise they have already been implemented).
However environmental issues are long term issues. On the long run “external costs” will become internal costs, so that investments in the environment are in the long term beneficial.
See my book “Eco-efficient Value Creation, sustainabl;e strategies for the circular economy” page 4 and 5.
Note: A complicated issue is energy savings: in most of the studies the positive effects of energy savings are overestimated, since the rebound effects are not taken into account.
This has always been the case to position two contrasting philosophies together to explain the world view. While economic view of ecology would reduce everything to measurable units to evaluate the issue as per the institutionalized value systems, only the point remains that we still might be at a considerable distance to confine the impacts of ours actions on a living and a dynamic system. So we approximate.....For example, a pro-environmental industrial unit invested in a training program to disseminate knowledge to the social community on how to save resource, energy, and water, based on the practices that it has institutionalized and generated tangible savings. Can we relate the savings of the resources within the economy to the training program? Or, if that can be a measure to justify the program, although we do believe that the program would definitely generate positive outcomes (?).
Limitation of the monetary measurement would also prove organisational investment as costlier when compared to the benefits that we hardly know or grasp within the economic reductionism. The part not getting measured here is the outcomes of ripple effects that our actions create, including the positive externalities that remain outside the equation due to our collective cognitive limitations, not to mention other positives that are yet to be a part of the economic evaluation system.
We can estimate the externalities via LCA (the eco-costs as a single indicator for prevention costs of pollution and materials depletion). Of course the result is an estimate, but any estimate is better than no estimate, since you can show that something has to be done, and you can benchmark alternative of end-of-pipe or system integrated solutions.
As far as the aforementioned example of education is concerned: there is no doubt that everything starts with education, and that education has a very large eco-efficiency in general. But education is not enough: without investment in sustainable systems it is not possible to reach sustainability.
Investments in education as well as sustainable systems have both the characteristics that it cost money on the short term and saves money on the long term in terms of “total costs”. The complex issue on saving money on the long term in industry is explained in my book “Eco-efficient Value creation”, Section 2. Here, the interaction between buyers (consumers/citizens), producers (industry) and governments (politics) plays a complex role. But in the end, citizens will not accept that producers and consumers will pollute the world free of charge. The eco-costs is the risk of non-compliance with future regulations that will be needed to bring our mother earth in a sustainable state. Such a risk is quite important in industry (examples: Hummer and Volkswagen diesel in the USA and Tepco in Japan). Strategic, pro-active, management can turn this risk into the challenge of a competitive edge.
Hard core environmentalists argue that all these calculations should be abandoned: we should just take action and don’t mention the costs, believing that is for the good cause. They forget however, that there are many quick actions which have a negative outcome on the long run (e.g. by the rebound effect). They also forget that quite many people think that we should spend our money the right, optimal, way. There are even people who think that too much money is spent on the environment, like Trump. Only business like calculations can convince Trump that he is leading the USA in the wrong direction.
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