9.2 Sustainability and business

Learning objectives

After reading this module, students should be able to

• understand how businesses incorporate sustainability into their plans, the basis of sustainable product chains, and factors that need to be considered in measuring and assessing sustainable performance

Introduction

Throughout this text the integrative nature of environmental, social, and economic sustainability has been stressed. In this chapter, various ways of framing the sustainability paradigm and measuring progress toward its achievement have been presented. This section focuses more directly on businesses, and how they attempt to incorporate sustainability into their decisions and plans. The business sector, continually seeking ways to create competitive advantages, has become acutely aware of the general value of adjusting various business models to accommodate consumers’ desires for sustainable products and services. Still, the broad definition of sustainable development provided by the Brundtland report is a difficult one to make operational. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development has adapted Brundtland to a view more understandable to business interests, focusing on living within the “interest” of natural systems and being cautious about drawing down the “principal” (i.e. degrading natural ecosystems), but there remain substantial differences on precisely how to measure progress toward the goals of the sustainability paradigm.

It is a common practice for businesses to refer to the triple bottom line    , a reference to the value of a business going beyond dollar profitability to include social and environmental costs and benefits as well. Indeed, many of the tools and indices outlined in Module Life Cycle Assessment and Module Sustainability Metrics and Rating Systems are widely used by businesses to measure progress toward corporate goals. However, there is no agreed upon way of using these tools, and many businesses have developed their own methods for assessing progress. This has, inevitably perhaps, led to claims and counter-claims by various parties about the “sustainability” of their products or services. Such claims usually find their way into corporate brochures and advertising so that, often without substantive backing or very subjective analysis, the impression of significant corporate sustainability is created, practices known generally as greenwashing    . Greenwashing is a concern because these kinds of advertising messages can mislead consumers about the “the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service” ( Greenpeace, 2011 ). Nevertheless, businesses must ultimately generate profits to remain viable, and increasingly they are being held to account for their impacts on all aspects of business operations, however difficult it may be to assign value to decisions made under conditions of considerable uncertainty. The intergenerational mandate of Brundtland and the nature of modern environmental problems facing society ask that business plans extend far beyond the usual five to ten year range.