Sustainability and Size

This discussion made me think about my home town and how size plays a role in sustainability. It was a great community for me to grow up in however due to its size it is not really sustainable. Many people work out of town as there is not sufficient industry at the immediate location. Agriculture is really the only industry that revolves around the town, now days it is not uncommon for farms to be 5000+ acres and there is only so much land for the farmers. Due to the increased size in farms, there is really only a limited number of people that can make a living off agriculture, thus the town has a population of less than 500 people. There is only one post office, one grocery store and one café and a school of <150 students. Anyone who is not employed through these businesses usually ends up traveling to work in the oil patch (Alberta) or the northern mines. There are fewer and fewer jobs and the majority of the young people are moving away after high school. This leads me to believe that this community is too small to sustain itself.

I’ve noticed that size matters in the sustainability of companies as well. The smaller companies are often put out of business if hard times hit, yet when companies get too big efficiency seems to decrease. I used to work for a large Uranium mine and we would often hire environmental consultants for our work. We mainly dealt with two consulting companies, CanNorth and Golder. We found that Golder was so big that they had a much higher overhead cost, and thus charged a lot more to do the exact same project (60% more at times). However, sometimes we would be forced to go with Golder as they had a wider field of specialty and CanNorth could not do what we needed to be done.

A second example of this is as Cameco increased in size the cost of business increased while productivity decreased. There was a higher focus on safety and more and more paper work and meetings were required, leading to a lesser degree of productivity.

There is definitely a happy medium, not too large and not too small. To determine and maintain the ideal size is the tricky part.