How do you eliminate the concept of waste? It’s a question that pervades our society. Plastic, throw away products go as waste to the landfill. Oil pumps into the oceans, wasting the oil while doing unthinkable damage to ecosystems and livelihoods. We emit twenty eight billion tons of invisible carbon dioxide every year as a waste product from burning fossil fuels.

So how to change all of that? Architect Bill McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart done a great job articulating and popularizing the concept of eliminating waste through cradle-to-cradle design of all products. It’s an inspiring concept, and I think exactly what we need to do. It opens up huge opportunities for innovation – we need to literally rethink and redesign all most all of our products, services, and systems (electrical, transportation, agricultural, etc.).

But the question remains – how exactly do we do that? These ideas have been around for quite a while, and while they’ve built a ton of momentum, especially in over the past ten years, we’ve got an incredibly long way to go. We still use about 1.4 earths-worth of stuff each year – digging into nature’s capital faster than it can regenerate.

How do we get many people to not only understand these intense, complex challenges, but also foster the cooperation, alignment, parameters, and modes of thinking that we’ll need to really make this kind of shift to a sustainable future, where the concept of waste is eliminated?

One of the most powerful ways of getting this process going is to literally imagine yourself in that kind of a future and then ask the question: “what did we do to get here?” This process is called backcasting – sort of the opposite of forecasting. It helps people – especially larger groups of people – to get past the limitations of their current situation, at least for the purposes of planning, and to unlock creative solutions and steps towards that sustainable future that might not otherwise be obvious.

One of the coolest examples of doing this that I’ve seen lately comes from the University of Illinois. In their recently released climate action plan, called iCAP, and developed as part of their participation in a Greenopolis Partner, the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment network, they lay out a strategy for achieving climate neutrality – net-zero greenhouse gas waste emissions by 2050 (in a sneak preview of an earlier draft, they literally introduced the plan with a letter written from the future-Chancellor on Earth Day, 2050, looking back over the past 40 years on how they successfully eliminated emissions by that date – I thought it was a pretty cool way to set the stage, but unfortunately it was dropped from the final version).

iCAP was developed in conjunction with a document called “The Strategic Opportunity in Global Sustainability Challenges: A Vision for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign” – which sets a vision for a sustainable future in which two main challenges are overcome:

“The first societal challenge focuses on the need to maintain natural ecosystem function and adapt human-dominated ecosystems to restore critical functions of natural ecosystems. Such ecosystems: (1) have closed loops (waste from any process is re-used or becomes input to another process), (2) re-use non-renewable resources (e.g., minerals), (3) use renewable resources (e.g., water and forestry supplies) at a rate less than their renewal rate, and (4) provide habitats to healthy populations of native species. Such an approach will be achieved through creative, system-level design of essential human services (e.g., food, water, shelter, energy, transportation, information, social interactions, security, and health care) that emphasize environmental as well as social and economic criteria.

“The second societal challenge focuses on impoverished communities, where a lack of essential human services, often accompanied by rapid population growth, threaten both local and global sustainability and create serious challenges to success on the first grand challenge. Better understanding of the economic, political, and social policy drivers of poverty is needed to develop creative solutions that enable citizens of these countries to sustainably develop needed capabilities, such as food and shelter, having good health and a life of normal length, and fulfilling social needs. To be sustainable, such capabilities must be supported within a diverse and equitable interdependence with economic markets, social security, government services, and political processes. This interdependence provides critical safety nets when environmental, economic, or social changes stress livelihoods.”

They then set five goals for making that future a reality:

• Goal 1: Create a new forum for in-depth, cross-disciplinary engagement on the sustainability grand challenges.
• Goal 2: Create and implement a sustainable campus operations plan that maintains or restores natural ecosystem function and supports impoverished communities.
• Goal 3: Infuse sustainable thinking into campus missions through new education activities.
• Goal 4: Create incentive programs that spur sustainability activities to meet the above goals.
• Goal 5: Create a viable financial plan for sustainability activities.

The iCAP then gets into more details focused on wasteful greenhouse gas emissions – including a very exciting target of eliminating their use of coal by 2017.

This approach of co-creating a compelling vision of a sustainable future and then backcasting to today to create strategies for getting there opens up amazing opportunities to create meaning, foster alignment, drive innovation, save money, generate value, and ensure well-being. It is the basis of strategic leadership towards sustainability, and is what informed the structure and framework of the Presidents’ Climate Commitment . It’s very exciting to see large and leading institutions like the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign putting it into practice and taking up humanity’s most exciting and important challenge.