Technology and environmental performance: Leveraging growth and sustainability

Technologies that improve environmental quality are hardly new. Indeed, a strong paradigm of what environmental technology is and how to elicit it developed within the nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Key to economic growth and environmentally friendly products, processes and systems, technological change is a neutral motive force that can be channelled toward whatever goals society chooses. Some policies in Asia-notably Indonesia's system of coding corporate environmental performance-operate on a similar principle. Indeed, the public pro-environmental positions taken by many multinational corporations can be leveraged in the effort, as well as the involvement of the non-governmental organisation community. The industries at the bedrock of these economies-automobiles, chemicals, steel, consumer durables-were resource-intensive, polluting, economically conservative and technologically rigid. One of the benefits of fast economic growth in Asia is almost a tautology: the aptitude for growth and change.