Sustainability has become an urgent requirement and challenge for mankind's survival on earth and for future development, considering the limits of resources and growth and the unequal distribution of wealth. Sustainability here is interpreted in environmental, economic and social dimensions.

Environmentally, non-renewable resources must not be disposed anymore but regained in product and material cycles. Chances of substituting them by renewables must be exploited, although only to such a degree that renewables can be responsibly regained, since the global consumption of renewable primary products already exceeds the world's biological capacity.

Economically, wealth can be achieved in the different areas of human living without increasing physical resource consumption by selling functionality rather than tangible products, e.g. by sharing concepts.

In the social dimension, a global village with less than one billion out of more than seven billion people consuming more than four fifths of global resources is hardly acceptable for living peacefully together. Teaching and learning for a global culture, wealth and health become vital tasks for the global human community.If the lifestyles of upcoming and also early industrialized communities alike will be continuously shaped by the existing, actually predominating technologies, that are responsible for a major part of the global resource consumption, then the need for resources will exceed every acceptable environmental, economic and social limit.