Beyond sustainability. Transforming industrial zero-valued residues into increasing economic returns

Excessive industrialization is creating enormous economic gaps, chaos and unequal societies that are approaching dangerous limits. Simultaneously, large quantities of residues, waste and ecological footprints have been created in detriment to the natural environment and the quality of life of most of the planet's population, mainly in developing regions. This presents most innovators with a new dilemma: Invest in sustainable long-term projects with low economic returns, or innovate in short-term incremental production and negotiate the environmental harm caused by an excessive industrialization. In fact, a significant milestone emerges from these arguments. Somehow, we must reverse the perverse cycle created by industrialization and transform the current ecological footprint into valuable assets, for all sub-systems of the biosphere. A proposal has been designed to go beyond sustainability and create sustainable wealth, based on the modification of the conventional growth paradigm, that can be used to regenerate regional natural resources and simultaneously be economically competitive and capable of offering important social benefits to the community. The proposed framework, SWIT (Sustainable Wealth creation based on Innovation and Technology) has been developed to provide multiple businesses of zero-value residue industrial ecology processes (ZRIES), inserted into circular value ecosystems (CVES), all managed and governed by a sustainable sharing value system for the benefit of a community. Several cases of the application of the sustainable wealth creation framework, mainly in developing countries, are described. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.