It’s a word you’ve heard before, referring to anything from electric cars to reusable coffee cups.
Sustainability.
It can mean a lot of different things and you can embody it in a lot of different ways. A simple definition for the 21st century considers sustainability as “the ability to maintain healthy environmental, social and economic systems in balance, indefinitely, on a global and local scale.”
When you really start thinking about it, sustainability is perhaps one of the biggest challenges humanity has come up against. Even if you’re completely off-grid, fully kitted out with solar panels and rainwater tanks, you still need tools for repair and seeds for planting. And most of us aren’t even close to that, living in our disposable, single-use urban areas.
Making our existence on this planet sustainable is going to be a species wide effort. So what does that effort mean to us at EarthOffset?
We believe that the same way people have used technology to throw out our balance with nature, we can use the same ingenuity and innovation to restore it. While we’ve certainly caused a lot of problems with industrialisation, energy production and infrastructure development, we’ve also advanced our species, improved billions of lives and made massive contributions to our collective experience.
Technology has allowed us to progress but it has done so in an unsustainable way. Sustainability means shifting our thinking.
Specifically for us, it’s waste technology. As long as we exist, humanity is never going to stop producing organic waste. Before our built-up houses and cities, organic waste would be produced by ecosystems and organisms at the same rate it can be absorbed and reused. Our population explosion, dense living environments and waste infrastructure have created a world that cannot return waste products back to the ecosystem to become valuable again.
We’re not going to stop living on top of each other and there (hopefully) isn’t going to be a mass population drop any time soon. We need to take our current waste production systems, whether from residents or restaurants, and collect and process it in a way that allows it to return to those ecosystems.
Compost can do all of that but it needs to be efficient, hygienic and scalable, which is where our technology comes in. To us, being sustainable means spending our lives building that technology and making it accessible to the world.
If being sustainable means something special to you as well, let us know through our socials - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn - and subscribe to our mailing list to stay in touch!