“Sustainable” is a word that a lot of people are throwing around these days. The word represents a very good idea, but it seems to me that this word has been almost completely coopted to mean something else entirely.

sustainable: “an action or process that is capable of continuing indefinitely” [source]

The most glaring example of this is when the word is applied to cars. Oil is a finite resource that causes many problems. Hybrid cars will never be sustainable because they run on oil. Even electric cars are nowhere near sustainable since most of our electricity comes from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. And it will never be environmentally sound to move around 4000 pounds of metal in order to transport 150 pounds of human. On top of all that, it takes a lot of oil to manufacture a car (plastic, grease, lubrication, etc.), and it generates a lot of pollution (solvents, fumes, paint, etc).

Another example of this is solar powered gadgets. A lot of solar powered gadgets are being produced these days and being labeled “sustainable”. Making something solar powered does not change the fact that a lot of energy was spent producing it (generally oil or coal energy), they are almost always are made from plastic (again, oil), the manufacture of electronics creates a lot of pollution (heavy metals, toxic solvents, etc.), and on and on.

So to me, it seems that the word sustainable has come to mean “some token gesture to environmentalism to assuage our guilty consciouses for our vast over-consumption”.