Population Growth, Sustainability, and Our Future

We celebrated World Population Day on July 11.

In 1989, the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Program World Population Day in order to focus the international community’s attention on the urgency and importance of population issues.

The world’s population is growing. There are 7.4 billion living on Earth, and the number goes up second-by-second because babies keep being born. In fact, the population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050.

We need sustainable growth.

The United Nations says that farmers will need to produce 70 percent more food to feed the expanding population. “If we change nothing,” says Cristian Barcan, the Vinyl Institute’s vice president of sustainability, “we will need three planets of natural resources by 2050.”

Sustainability is about doing and producing more with less— better environmental and natural resources stewardship with economic sense and social due diligence. Learn about how you can move to a more sustainable future. Plus find out how to identify your brand’s sustainable pathway and the role of lifecycle assessments in sustainability.

The planet’s not getting any bigger — and it’s going to take all of us, together, to make a difference.