sustainable

Pluralsustainables

1. 1
   adjective

   Able to be produced or maintained over an indefinite period without harming the environment or using up a resource; renewable.

   Like a bank account where you spend only the interest and never the savings, so the money never runs out.

   Fisheries managed at sustainable levels allow fish populations to replenish each season.

   Designers increasingly favor sustainable materials that can be harvested without exhausting forests.

   Similarrenewable, green, eco-friendly

   Oppositeunsustainable

   Note

   Out of the plain "keep going" sense comes this ecological one: what can be kept up without using the world up. It attaches readily to food and the systems around it, as in sustainable meat or a sustainable economy. It often travels with organic, seasonal and local, as in Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw (2010). Context settles the meaning: a sustainable pace is merely bearable, while sustainable meat makes an environmental claim.

2. 2
   adjective

   Able to be maintained, continued, or kept up over a period of time.

   Like a fire with enough fuel to keep burning steadily rather than flaring up and dying out.

   The rapid growth proved sustainable only as long as cheap credit lasted.

   Doctors questioned whether the intense training schedule was sustainable over many years.

   Similarviable, maintainable, feasible, tenable

   Oppositeunsustainable, untenable

3. 3
   nouncountable

   An energy source that renews itself naturally and is not used up, such as solar, wind, or hydro power.

   Like an orchard that bears new fruit each season instead of a mine that slowly empties out.

   The utility plans to replace its coal plants with a mix of sustainables over the next decade.

   Investors increasingly treat each new sustainable as a long-term asset.

   Similarrenewable

   Note

   The adjective turned count noun, and it is most at home in the plural as a collective label for clean energy sources. Joseph Francis Coates and his co-authors, writing in 1996, set sustainables against fossil fuels and beside nuclear energy. Where the bare noun could be misread as the adjective, sustainable energy sources is the safer phrasing.

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