Enterprise sustainability program

courtesy : Enterprise sustainability program

Terminology

A sustainable business is any organization that participates in Environmentally friendly or green activities to ensure that all processes, products, and manufacturing activities adequately address current environmental concerns while maintaining a profit. In other words, it is a business that “meets the needs of the present [world] without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It is the process of assessing how to design products that will take advantage of the current environmental situation and how well a company’s products perform with renewable resources.

The Brundtland Report emphasized that sustainability is a three-legged stool of people, planet, and profit. Sustainable businesses with the supply chain try to balance all three through the triple-bottom-line concept-using sustainable development and sustainable distribution to affect the environment, business growth, and the society.

Everyone affects the sustainability of the marketplace and the planet in some way. Sustainable development within a business can create value for customers, investors, and the environment. A sustainable business must meet customer needs while, at the same time, treating the environment well.

To succeed in such an approach, where stakeholder balancing and joint solutions are key, requires a structural approach. One philosophy, that includes many different tools and methods, is the concept of Sustainable Enterprise Excellence. Another is the adoption of the concept of responsible growth.

Sustainability is often confused with corporate social responsibility (CSR), though the two are not the same. Bansal and DesJardine (2014) state that the notion of ‘time’ discriminates sustainability from CSR and other similar concepts. Whereas ethics, morality, and norms permeate CSR, sustainability only obliges businesses to make intertemporal trade-offs to safeguard intergenerational equity.

Short-termism is the bane of sustainability. While CSR and sustainability are not the same, they are related to each other. Determining salaries, implementing new technology, and retiring old plants all have an impact on the firm’s stakeholders and the natural environment.

Green business has been seen as a possible mediator of economic-environmental relations, and if proliferated, would serve to diversify our economy, even if it has a negligible effect on lowering atmospheric CO₂ levels. The definition of “green jobs” is ambiguous, but it is generally agreed that these jobs, the result of green business, should be linked to “clean energy” and contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gases. These corporations can be seen as generators of not only “green energy”, but as producers of new “materialities” that are the product of the technologies, these firms developed and deployed.

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