ABSTRACT
Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who noticed the tendency for many completely different things to be distributed very unevenly, but unevenly in a predictable way. Pareto's work and social beliefs have been conflated with fascism, rightly or wrongly, and he fell out of favour. It was management consultant Joseph Juran who dusted off the theory in the 1950s, named it 'The Pareto Principle' and started applying it to business. The mathematical basis for the 80/20 Rule is the Power Law distribution. The basic idea of the 80/20 Rule is that will be much more effective if put energy into the 20 percent of activities that deliver 80 percent of the results and put less emphasis the 80 percent which deliver only 20 percent. There are numerous examples of 80/20-style imbalances in the sustainability sphere. All of the examples illustrate that the really significant sustainability issues in many product/service sectors are often determined by a very small number of factors.
