There is no PLANET B! | Seneca Business: Principles for Responsible Management Education | Seneca Polytechnic

Krishnapriya Usha recently graduated from the Sustainable Business Management graduate certificate program. In this blog entry she reflects on the importance of sustainability, and her experience in and takeaways from the program.

Can you imagine a situation of having to create a new planet the same as this one to make a living space for our future generations? Have you ever thought what we would do if there was no oxygen, healthy food or fresh water to drink, as these are the basic amenities to live? We as human beings are depleting our environment in order to make money by doing harm to our mother Earth through our businesses. All of us are a part of that directly or indirectly. To give you a simple example, if you are buying a product from a company that is not sustainable and has harmful production practices, in this way, you are also contributing to environmental depletion.

A sustainable business is a business that strives to meet the triple bottom line.  This is an enterprise that has minimal negative impact or potentially even a positive effect on the global or local environment, community, society and economy. Sustainability is interdependent, systemic and long term, which shows us that people and planet must come first in a business. This subject teaches us how businesses should create wealth and make people’s lives better without compromising the health and means of the future and also trying to reduce waste and pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Businesses can help each other achieve this, for example, a business can use another organization’s waste as input for its own production processes and sell its waste. This reuse is part of the circular economy which it is a very common term we come across nowadays.

Sustainability is a broader topic that we cannot learn in a single course, but this topic makes us think differently when we indulge more into it. The Sustainable Business Management program at Seneca gives us an overall idea about the social, economic, governance and environmental aspects of sustainability. Most of the professors in this program have real-life experience in sustainability which also helped me improve professionally as an international student. In my personal experience, this subject even changed my lifestyle a lot. I learned to live a minimal life by contributing less waste to the environment. For example, I became more selective in choosing a brand before buying a product and learned that not all products that have green advertisements are in fact sustainable, and expensive organic products in supermarkets may not truly be that. These examples are simply known as greenwashing. 

In Canada, we live in a multicultural society that means people from all over the world are here. It is very important to respect all the cultures in our workplace and society. Social impact in the first semester gave us more insight about this and taught us the importance of mental health in the workplace to be more productive. In the second semester there is one Capstone project and throughout the semester we work with a Canadian company. This is especially useful for international students for us to learn more about the work culture here. I am sure that this subject is going to mold us professionally and personally for the improvement of our planet. To be continued ….

Thank you,

Krishnapriya Usha

Sustainable Business Management Graduate at Seneca College