Abstract

The current mode of economic activities has led the world to a potential environmental catastrophe. Government’s environmental, health and safety regulations and industry’s voluntary initiatives to balance business and environmental sustainabilities have largely failed. Here we discuss the economic/legal/social context within which business decisions regarding products and processes have been made to understand why the sustainability balance has not been achieved. We review four models from the literature which propose frameworks for sustainable development to see how the conditions in each would drive business decisions. We posit that a new economy model of distributed capitalism is required to achieve the desired sustainability balance.