The fashion industry deliberately promotes new fashions every season to encourage consumers to throw out their old clothes and buy new replacements.
Car manufacturers deliberately make cosmetic changes to the appearance of cars to encourage consumers to spend a lot of money upgrading to the latest model.
Business Careers Environmental Consultants provide advice to organisations on ways to reduce pollution, protect the environment and become more environmentally sustainable. They are mainly employed by specialist companies.
Case Study A magic carpet idea
Most office buildings have carpet floors which are replaced every 10 years or so when areas of carpet become worn. Replacing carpets can be very disruptive. Offices need to be closed and furniture moved to allow for the old carpets to be taken up and new ones to be laid. In addition, workers can be exposed to toxic carpet glue fumes. The old carpets then have to be transported
and dumped in a landfill where, because of all the synthetic fabrics in them, they will not biodegrade for over 20,000 years. Entrepreneur Ray Anderson realised that putting thousands of tons of old carpets into landfill dumps every year was unnecessarily wasteful and environmentally unsustainable. As an entrepreneur, he also saw a business opportunity. He realised that people want to walk on and look at carpets, not own them. He decided to rent carpet to customers for a small monthly fee. In return, his enterprise, Interface Carpets, would take full responsibility for keeping his customers’ carpets clean and fresh. This involves fitting carpet tiles instead of full carpets and carrying out monthly inspections to replace only those tiles that are worn out. Replacement tiles are fitted overnight to minimise inconvenience to customers and the old carpet tiles are brought back to the factory to be recycled and made into new tiles.
