One of the best ways to make change happen in our daily lives is to vocalize – verbalise—what we want to see. Using words that are positive and actionable in the right direction help us keep right actions top-of-mind. By this, I mean that the words we use matter and can make a difference in how we perceive the world around us and how much effort we put into enacting positive change. With properly used words, we avoid greenwashing and practice good corporate social responsibility (CSR).

For instance, take the word disposable. When we dispose of something, we believe it has outgrown its function and is no longer needed, so we remove it from our vicinity. But this word is fraught with misunderstanding, false meaning, and negative consequences as we’ll explore below.

In this article, I share 3 of the worst words we still use daily and shouldn’t. And 3 of the most helpful words to support efforts to be truly environmentally and socially responsible.

The 3 Worst Words in Business

Disposable.

Easily at the top of the list (or bottom of the pile), “disposable” forms from the preposition dis and the root pose, meaning to place. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it appeared in Middle English from the French disposer, meaning to “arrange, order, control, regulate and the original root ponere, to put, place.

Basically, it’s putting something somewhere. We’ve adopted a meaning that indicates whatever is being put somewhere is trash and is being rejected, turned into waste, and meant to be forgotten. Our over-the-top culture of stuff has desensitized us to how much stuff we have and what we do with it when it no longer satisfies us. Something we consider disposable is cheap, worthless, lifeless, and inconvenient. (See the fabulous NPR article about magazine editor Lloyd Stouffer who actively made it his mission to ingrain disposability and a single-use ethos into plastic products and the entire American mindset. Yes, we can blame a single person and his cronies.

In fact, we now mean disposable “to throw away,” as if it will simply disappear from existence, which brings us to our second terrible term.

Away.

Where is away? Away is another convenient and damaging term that should leave our vocabularies because there is no “away.” Trash that we “dispose” of will continue to be here, somewhere. It’s in the landfill, it’s in the ocean, it’s ingested by the marine mammal, it’s at the bottom of the mountain gorge.

When I served as Program Director for Appalachian Voices, a nonprofit advocacy group fighting Mountaintop Removal, I discovered the harsh truth about how coal executives define “away.” To them, away meant bulldozing tens of thousands of acres of virgin Appalachian forest and pushing the “debris” or “waste”—felled trees, shrubs, rocks, soil, fungi, and habitat that had been a thriving ecosystem before the mining company arrived—into the valleys and streams. This leveled the ground so that there were no longer mountains and no longer valleys – it was all flat. And there was nothing living. When I visited West Virginia to see the devastation first-hand, I was appalled. Standing on a ledge (trespassing, officially) overlooking what had been millions of acres of forest, I witnessed a desert.

So this brings us to our next word in need of retirement: Waste.

Waste.

Because the winners of the battles get to write history, we have been left with a narrative that describes the “waste” of any particular activity as something we don’t want. In fact, in the example above, “debris” consists of the very natural resources most environmentalists are trying to protect that were unscrupulously dumped and destroyed in a mining company’s efforts to extract coal. In reality, this “waste” consists of exactly what attracted most recreation-goers, campers, and hikers travel specifically for enjoyment. One person’s lush forest destination is another (mining executive’s) debris. Isn’t it time we stopped allowing coal manufacturers to dictate the narrative?

Waste in a commercial economy really don’t exist. It’s simply mishandled and poorly dealt with. In nature, there is no waste. An animal eats, excretes what it can’t use, and the excrement becomes soil fertilizer to nourish a new plant. All across nature there are examples of how one being’s waste becomes another being’s nutrient. It should absolutely be this way in manufacturing and commercialism. There are companies trying hard to develop products with a “cradle to cradle” approach, meaning they put a great deal of effort into designing a program up-front with components that can be pulled apart and repurposed.

In 2024, it’s surprising that we still rely on landfills, great swaths of otherwise useful land where we dump and discard things we are too irresponsible to use. The landfill is “away” and should be abolished as a concept.

3 4 Words We Should Use More

Circular.

According to the European Parliament, “The circular economy is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. In this way, the life cycle of products is extended.” It counters the old idea of disposable in a way that emphasizes pre-thinking and pre-planning for all product development. It also puts the onus of responsibility not only on the consumer (who is left with the trash after a product is used) but on the manufacturer and/or distributing company (who made the product in the first place).

Naked.

Packaging makes up more than 28% of our garbage, and it shouldn’t. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), containers and packaging amounted to 82.2 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018, and it’s likely much more now in 2024 since many companies have abused the fears caused by the Covid pandemic to increase their packaging in a bid to gain consumer trust.

So many items for sale are overly packaged. Companies declare that they need additional security measures to deter shoplifters (though the recent type of theft—with thieves barging into a store and cramming their bags full of goods in broad daylight makes this argument inadequate). Companies also want their products to “stand out” on the shelf and catch a shopper’s eye, using colors, bands, boxes, hangers, zip-ties, stickers, tags and all manner of excess packaging to do so.

Going naked isn’t about skinny-dipping in the local pond. It’s about reducing the packaging on products so that environmental protection is top-of-mind and responsible resource use is priority. I get frustrated when I walk in my local grocery store and find all the fruits and vegetables wrapped in plastic or foam “nets” or arranged on hard foam trays. It’s completely unnecessary and instead of deterring contamination it actually deters me (and others) from supporting that store at all. Naked products utilize minimal packaging and what’s there is biodegradable, reusable, and/or recyclable.

Responsible

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “responsible” comes from the Latin respons-, meaning to answer to or pledge.

‘The meaning "reliable, trustworthy" is from 1690s. It retains the sense of "obligation" in the Latin verb. It would be good in my opinion to reclaim the true meaning of this word as it has lost a bit of its verve. Today the word seems dusty and old-fashioned and has a sense of dowdy old headmistress about it. (And it's definitely not as fun as "naked"!)

But some companies are pulling this word out from obscurity and giving it new life. The term Corporate Social Responsibility implies a business is operating on grounds of environmental and social activism – certainly in line with the sense of “obligation” and trustworthiness seen in its Latin origins.

But responding isn’t enough. Companies need to predict and act according to what might happen in the future, ie. With a product or a service. How can we develop this product to be reusable? Recyclable? Circular? This is a forward-looking approach, not a past-focused approach that is implied with “responsible.”

To this end, I submit a fourth word for our list: Ready.

Ready

I was heartened to find that others are using the word ready to describe companies and organizations that are moving beyond a linear framework and into a more wholistic vision of what decision-making should be.

For instance, Gibran Rivera writes in his article for the Interaction Institute for Social Change, ““Readiness” on the other hand seems to be testing for something else. In my experience, testing for readiness must include the skillful probing into a group’s interest or capacity to engage an “adaptive challenge.” And here I’m using the language of Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky who skillfully make the distinction between technical problems and those challenges that demand a shift at the level of values, beliefs and assumptions. It seems to me that a “pre-planning phase” can serve to solve a technical problem, but an adaptive challenge demands organizational readiness.”

In other words, it’s not enough to plan, or even pre-plan. A company must exist in a state of readiness before it launches that new product that could have significant consequences on land, water, animals, humans. Pre-planning is really a step within a list of steps; but being READY signifies that you’ve reached a particular level of depth of understanding… far more important than simply going through the steps of a process.

I would love to see “Ready” as a benchmark for corporate culture, corporate product development, and environmental and social responsibility. How could this term be integrated into standards and, more importantly, understood and embraced at a functional company level? I’m not sure. But it’s a word that may get us going in the right direction.

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