What is Sustainability?

For any business considering a sustainability initiative, the topic can quickly become daunting.  The deeper you look, the more all-encompassing the topic appears, especially as defined through the 17 objectives established by the UN Division for Sustainable Development Goals.  While these global aspirations are important and worth being aware of, it’s helpful to take a more pragmatic view if you want to begin figuring out where your own business actions can make a difference, or even just figure out where you should begin.  

Most explanations of sustainability will reference the official UN definition which was established in this 1987 UN Report.  There sustainable development is defined as:

“development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs“†

To begin moving our thoughts in a more actionable direction, this summary from environmentalscience.org is a helpful reference:

“Sustainability looks to protect our natural environment, human and ecological health, while driving innovation and not compromising our way of life.”

In this definition, you start to get a sense of the three broad categories that sustainability aims to address:  Environmental Protection, Social Responsibility, and Economic Practice. These are often referred to as the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ – meaning three equally weighted categories of business outcomes that should drive your core business strategy and decision making. You will also often find these categories more informally labeled as ‘people, profits, and planet.’

If you’re just getting started with sustainability, the idea of adding two giant new success metrics to your core business model might feel overwhelming – or flat out impossible depending on where you sit within your organization. Luckily, this triple bottom line model doesn’t need to be in place in order to get started. Instead, think of it as a great end goal to envision – imagine your entire business being equally driven by these 3 priorities in a maintainable balance. Just keep that picture in the back of your mind as you get started with some more bite-sized sustainability efforts. To begin deciding where to start, we can look at specific objectives that fall under each category of sustainability.

Environmental Protection

In the Environmental category, big factors we expect to see – like climate changing emissions, environmental pollution, and safe ingredients – all appear. These are likely the types of changes most people immediately picture when they think about sustainability.

While these items are some of the most expected topics to see in sustainability, each one has a lot of different ways it can be tackled. Applying these goals to your product or service can look very different from applying these goals to your operations and overhead. Also if you invest any of your business capital you can evaluate the sustainability ratings of your investment portfolio (in fact, divestment is one of the more powerful levers with potential for significant global impact). The EU is also defining their own framework for evaluating whether a company is considered a sustainable investment.

Social Responsibility

In the second category, we see factors that are less frequently included in people’s high level ideas about what sustainability means. In this category the reality of how business practices impact the lives of real people begins to emerge. It’s also where sustainability can start to feel more meaningful. While gradual environmental degradation may not inspire all people to feel a passionate need for change, tangible impact on people’s lives all over the world is a cause whose importance is difficult to ignore.

Making sure your business decisions aren’t harming communities and people in your supply chain or after your product reaches your end consumer is part of a robust sustainability effort.

Economic Practice

Like Social Responsibility, many people might assume that Economic factors fall outside of the domain of sustainability. But just as reliance on depleting resource stores is not sustainable, neither is a business model that fails to address profitability and other factors for commercial success.

You may also notice that these three categories have plenty of overlapping interests. Avoiding pollution and toxic materials in your products is beneficial for both environmental and human health. Making sure you won’t run out of raw materials or other resources supports environmental and economic sustainability. And of course if you make a product that no-one is interested in, it makes no difference how eco-friendly your supply chain or manufacturing practices are. Finding the right balance of all three – and the most impactful focus areas to target first – will set you up to be a competitive market player with stronger positioning for long term success.