We consume more than one planet's worth of material yearly, so sustainability alone isn't enough. Companies should shift from extracting new resources to harvesting ocean plastics and urban waste, then redesigning supply chains to actively restore ecosystems and communities rather than just minimize harm.
So we might have bought laundry detergent and the front of the bottle says bottle made from ocean plastics, or you have leggings or something from ocean plastics. That's one type of recovery. We're recovering value that some people would call trash or pollution, but it's value if we put it back into our value chains. And I think we'll be recovering value from our cities and from other dense areas in the future instead of from the planet. One, because we're just running out of what's inside the planet, but two, because we have just so much material to work with to be able to bring into our value chains. This one is a really tough one for some people to get their heads around, but essentially what this says is, look, it's almost— it's kind of too late to be sustainable. Sustain is like, let's continue the path that we are on today. How do we continue doing what we're doing today into the future? But we have pushed the planet beyond where we can do that. We already need more than one planet's worth of material every year. And so if we continue that, we're actually just kind of adding to the problem. So regeneration means how do we restore ecosystems? How do we leave the area around our operations better than how we found it? And in some cases that might look like cleaning water before we return it to the watershed. It might look like investing in the communities where we operate. So it can look like a number of different items, but it's a tougher one to wrap our heads around to say, can we in supply chain truly leave this area better, and we certainly can. And there's examples of this from different supply chains.
