Chapter 8 BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT

Document begins: Chapter 8 BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT Traditionally, companies and public sector trading organisations report on their economic performance. But, in response to public and community demand, increasingly more companies are introducing reporting mechanisms which also include consideration of their performance in addressing the environmental and social perspectives of their operations. This has come to be known as sustainability auditing and triple bottom line (TBL) reporting. Examples of such mechanisms are described below. Most tend to be based on answering a series of questions. In a recent study, Buselich (2002) takes the view that a triple bottom line assessment cannot be considered a genuine sustainability assessment since the environmental, social and economic dimensions are not integrated from the start and "simply present a list of social, environmental and economic concerns to be analysed in decision-making, rather than integrating and analysing these concerns throughout the assessment process" and is, therefore, perhaps best thought of as `interim/transitional form' of sustainability assessment. TBL is being widely used. In Australia, for example, the City of Melbourne is working in partnership with the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) to develop a toolkit for integrating TBL into local government through ...