Sustainability Q&A

with responses by Michael Tillman, Principal Consultant and Sustainability Team Leader

In our last issue, we asked for your sustainability questions. Thanks for your responses! We've chosen a few questions to answer in this issue, and will continue to answer reader questions in select issues going forward.

Sustainability — I'm starting to hear people talking about it. What is it and how do I get started doing it?

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Also Recommended

In this Issue:
A Big Picture Approach to Sustainability for Manufacturers
From the Archives:
Are you Prepared to Answer the Sustainability Question?
Free Webcast:
Promoting Sustainability in Your Organization
Edition 23 Table of Contents
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Sustainability, as defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development, means "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."  The sustainable business model incorporates the analysis of an organization’s environmental, economic and social impacts and asks the question: “Can you continue to operate the way you operate and reasonably expect the environment, the community and the economy to support you?” Operating in a sustainable manner is an ideal, but reporting on how you are moving toward this is more tangible.  Before you can tell the world why you operate in a sustainable manner, you need to look inward and evaluate how you operate.

To get started, we recommend that you do three things in this order:

  1. Assemble your team

  2. Communicate your mission

  3. Perform a gap analysis with benchmarking

Assemble the team:  The team should include a multifunctional mix of people; remember this is not just an environmental management system.  Look outside the traditional EHS roles and get a broad representation of your company’s employees.  They will all have valuable input.

Communication your mission: Communicate also means educate; the team must have a complete understanding of what sustainability means in the scope of your business.  You may use a combination of brown bag presentations, contests, surveys, etc. —  it’s up to you.  Choose a method that’s effective in your corporate culture, but don’t overlook this step. 

Perform a gap analysis:  Make a comprehensive list of your organization’s programs, policies, initiatives, etc., that relate to environmental, social and economic performance.  The Global Reporting Initiative's website has a reporting framework that can help you determine what you’ll want to report on, and how to structure that data, or you may find that you want third party assistance to guide you through the process. The gap analysis can be performed on you, your competitors, and your vendors using the same format.  Keep it simple and remember that the data has to be evaluated when you are done.

After you complete these first three tasks, you should be ready to make a plan of action for developing a sustainability program and report. Decide what you’ll report on, and how you’ll measure improvement. For those areas of environmental, economic and social performance that need strengthening, you may need to develop specific programs and effectively implement them long enough to gain data on their performance. Again, you may find that you want third party assistance to help develop and implement your programs and/or your report.

What is the biggest obstacle to implementing and subsequently reporting on your sustainable business practices? 

The concept of sustainable business practices has recently and rapidly become one of the corporate “buzzwords” that you seem to hear everywhere these days. Internal education, from the top down to the production floor, is a critical first step in the process.  Sustainable business practices sometimes get “quarantined” in the environmental arena, which is an important area, but arguably only one third of the pie — don’t ignore the social and economic areas!  Educating otherwise well-meaning “corporate citizens” about the need to identify, quantify, and improve on their social, economic, and environmental performance is the key. 

Promoting Sustainability in Your Organization - Free Webcast!The G3 Guidelines from the Global Reporting Initiative are quite specific about communicating clearly and openly about sustainability, with stakeholders’ interests in mind.  Although it is common to look outside the organization at shareholders and the community in which you operate, the employees who are responsible for executing sustainable  programs and policies must first have buy-in.  It is easier to get assistance from employees across the business if they have a stake in the process and know why their input is needed.

Additional resources