Sustainability quotients and the social footprint

Abstract

We argue that most of what passes for mainstream reporting in corporate sustainability management fails to do precisely the one thing it purports to do -which is make it possible for organizations to measure and report on the sustainability of their operations. It fails because of the lack of what the Global Reporting Initiative calls sustainability context, a shortcoming from which it, too, suffers. We suggest that this missing context calls for a new notion of sustainability (the binary perspective), which can be conceptualized in the form of sustainability quotients. We provide specifi cations for such quotients in ecological and social contexts, and suggest that sustainability is best understood in terms of the impact organizations can have on the carrying capacity of non-fi nancial capital, or what in the social case we call anthro capital. We conclude by introducing a quantitative quotientsbased method for measuring and reporting on the social sustainability of an organization, the social footprint method.

A proposal to measure absolute environmental sustainability in life cycle assessment

“…those related to human health impacts and depletion of non-renewable resources. Carrying capacity does per definition not apply to such impact categories, but other more normative sustainability references may be quantified (McElroy et al, 2008).…”

Incorporating sustainable development in the design of mineral processing operations – Review and analysis of current approaches

“…The triple bottom line (TBL) 2 approach features heavily. There is usually an emphasis on reducing the environmental impact, per tonne of product [13], with little attention directed to the total amount of emissions or the context in which those emissions occur [14,15]. For example, an operation can conceivably reduce its CO 2 emissions per tonne of product, but if the number of tonnes of product increases sufficiently the operation's total CO 2 emissions will increase, thus making a larger contribution to global warming.…”

Reductive Radical Decarboxylation of Aliphatic Carboxylic Acids

“…Therefore, in the case of impacts on a global scale, it is deemed most useful to use the local, national or industry-level targets as pseudo-carrying capacities. Similar approaches have been applied elsewhere (McElroy et al 2008;Yossapoll et al 2002).…”

“…They provide relative measures of sustainability (Jin and High 2004) that do not include the contextual elements that binary models of sustainability would be required to employ (McElroy et al 2008). There are many merits in these models because they provide a yardstick for comparing different processes and impacts for a generalised location.…”

“…Negative sustainability values indicate the magnitude of the carrying capacity breach (or level of unsustainability), which others have considered useful (McElroy et al 2008;Pope et al 2004). However, in this case, we assume that once the carrying capacity is breached, the plant is unsustainable and, therefore, we assign a 0 per cent value for all SM less than or equal to 0 per cent.…”