Synonyms
Introduction
Basically, “sustainable” means – as the word implies – that something can be sustained, i.e., continued at that level, in principle indefinitely. Sustainability has many synonyms, such as durability and viability. In the environmental debate, sustainability is often used interchangeably with the term “sustainable development” even though they are two different concepts. For example, Waas et al. (2011) mention that some scholars assert that the term “sustainable development” is primarily about development/economic growth, whereas sustainability gives priority to the environment. Reid (1995) and Martin (2008) argue that the difference is rather that sustainable development should be seen as the process or journey to achieving sustainability which then according to Graedel and Howard-Grenville is an absolute concept “…as are pregnant and unique, to use two common examples. A sustainable world is not one that is slightly more environmentally...
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Moltesen, A., Hauschild, M.Z., Dornfeld, D., Kara, S. (2019). Sustainability. In: Chatti, S., Laperrière, L., Reinhart, G., Tolio, T. (eds) CIRP Encyclopedia of Production Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53120-4_6615
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