progressX

-- a note from _kt75 Since the economic (i.e. profitable) breakthrough of 'sustainability' in the beginning of this century the number of standards, protocols, labels and certificates, that in principle shall provide some form of sustainability guarantee of a certain product and/or service (but typically fail to provide such), has literally exploded. Today, labels and certificates (based upon standards and protocols of any possible nature) are as common as commercial product brands and created in a number of cases some sort of symbiosis with real products and/or services. This rather critical and actually adverse development basically has its origin in the formation of brand-awareness since the late 1960ies and can result in an undesirable because manipulated form of product and/or service dependency (by e.g. consumers) and prevent from unbiased sustainable development (i.e. it can help to preserve conditions that are not progressive, e.g. rescues of ailing banks). The key pro...