DLL chairman and CEO Bill Stephenson released an article regarding the future of leasing. Read an excerpt, below, or click here to read the full article.

“The business we are in is about helping our customers thrive in tough, competitive marketplaces. This means having to understand their immediate business needs from every angle. But we also need to look at the bigger picture and help them find the best long-term route to resilience and ongoing commercial success.

One of the big issues relates to our environmental impact and how we can build commercially attractive sustainable businesses. We live on an ever crowded planet forecast to rise from seven billion people to 9.6 billion by 2050.

The good news is that increasing numbers of people in the rising markets, many with disposable income for the first time, could boost demand, creating new business opportunities for all of us.

By 2025, the management consultancy McKinsey has estimated that annual consumption in the emerging markets would rise to $30 trillion, up from $12 trillion in 2010, and account for nearly 50% of the world’s total, up from 32% in 2010.

The bad news is that planet earth cannot supply the resources industry will need indefinitely to meet this kind of demand. By mid-century, some environmentalists say, we might need five planet earths to sustain our needs if nothing is done to improve our resource efficiency.

At present, about 80% of the waste from consumer goods such as food, beverages, packaging, clothes and shoes ends up in incinerators, landfill and wastewater. The squeeze on the planet’s finite resources is already here. Commodity prices experience more price hikes and volatility today than in the past century, with many resources harder to extract or find.

And some experts warn we may even be running out of some important materials. Professor James Clark, for example, from York University in the UK says if used at current rates such precious materials as gold, silver, indium, iridium and tungsten will be depleted in the next five to fifty years. Clearly, we all need to think innovatively about ways to develop goods that can be recycled and reused in as many closed loops as possible.”