Sustainability by Design

John Ehrenfeld, Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, Retired Director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, and a Senior Research Scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Presented by the David O'Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise at the John Molson School of Business in collaboration with the Design and Computation Arts Department at Concordia University.

Friday, March 23, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. – noon
Concordia University MB Building, Room MB 2.270
1450 Guy Street (de Maisonneuve Blvd. West), Montreal, Quebec. View map

Sustainability has become a key element of business strategy, but remains poorly defined. Current sustainability strategies risk becoming irrelevant or worse because they fail to acknowledge and address the systemic roots of unsustainability that lie deep in cultural structure. The talk will explore these root causes and present an alternative set of cultural drivers better aligned with sustainability. New roles and strategies for businesses will be discussed. Dr. Ehrenfeld retired in June 2009 as Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology after guiding its development since it was founded in 2000. He is the author of Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture. He returned to MIT in 1985 after a long career in the environmental field, and retired in 2000 as the Director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, an interdisciplinary educational, research, and policy program. He continues to teach, do research, and write. He serves on the adjunct faculty at the Marlboro College Graduate Center where he teaches Exploring Sustainability to students in their MBA for Managing Sustainability program. In October 1999, the World Resources Institute/Aspen Institute honored him with their first lifetime achievement award for his academic accomplishments in the field of business and environment. He received the Founders Award for Distinguished Service from the Academy of Management’s Organization and Natural Environment Division in August 2000. He is an editor of the Journal of Industrial Ecology. He holds a B. S. and Sc. D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT, and is author or co-author of over 200 papers, books, reports, and other publications.

Download the event poster


For more information, please contact:

Andrew Ross
David O’Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise
John Molson School of Business
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514-848-2424 ext. 5131