By Travis Mills

I’ve never been one to gaze into the future to try to guess what is coming round the corner. I was always told it was too dangerous. But with a small glimmer of promise of a sustainable future beginning to appear, I have begun to ask myself... “What would be included in a sustainable future?”

Many years ago the distant relative of that thing with four wheels parked in your garage was run by electricity. That distant relative is once again looking more and more likely to reappear. On January 7 2011, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Ford announced its new Ford Focus Electric, the revamped version of their popular small family car.

The Electric is the company’s first fuel-free, zero emission, rechargeable passenger car. It is thought to be the new leader in fully electric vehicles at its release in 2013 as it offers a better mile-per-gallon equivalent than it’s General Motors built competitor the Chevrolet Volt. It can also charge in half the time of Nissan’s electric equivalent, the Leaf.

But what is truly sustainable about this vehicle is that even the car’s production will be powered by solar energy at Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant. Slowly but surely competition in this sector is heating up and in turn prices are coming down, to a point perhaps where over 80 percent of cars on the road will one day be fully electric.

In the future sustainable business world, I see an international emissions trading business scheme that will encourage the growth of sustainable business practices. A new green sector will have formed, powered by the sun, wind and water.

However, the biggest change that will have occurred in the business world is that all waste created by one organisation would be reused or recycled by another. We, the consumer, would be a lot more localised, buying products that are grown or manufactured within 300km of our home base, in turn building stronger local economies.

Internationally everyone will benefit from new sustainable homes built from steel, earth, or other new sustainable materials. Homes will conserve water, heat and last for generations. When these homes are ready to be demolished, the materials will be able to be reused and recycled.

While at the moment this future might appear a bit out touch, I truly believe that in the next twenty years my generation will create a number of new products and ideas that might just lead to a sustainable future. After all we don’t know what could be discovered tomorrow, do we?