In any of my past posts, you may have come across the term Triple Bottom Line (TBL). It’s a term we use extensively within my Sustainability Management classes; to us it is the nucleus of our program, the catalyst to our discussions, and the cause of our daily practices… yet many people are unaware of what it means. The TBL encompasses three sectors: People, Profit, and Planet. Before I started studying this topic, I was oblivious to the fact that the media only highlights one third of the matter, the Planet. At the same time it fails to acknowledge the other two sectors: People and Profit. Those last two sectors can get a bit tricky and aren’t commonly thought of by the consumer so I’m on a mission to divulge the two a bit more to make you, the consumer, more educated.
People
What do people have to do with sustainability?…remember when Joe Fresh’s factory collapsed back in 2013? Well that would be the people aspect. According to the Triple Bottom Line, a sustainable company (and world) must take into account the well-being of its people. These social variables refer to education, equity and access to social resources, health and well-being, quality of life, and social capital (to name a few). Factors such as unemployment rates, violence crimes, poverty, and even average commute times can seriously harm a nation. For example, the Joe Fresh factory was run by underpaid ($1-2 a day), under educated (can’t afford school), and overworked employees who were forced into working in unsafe conditions due to sparse employment opportunities elsewhere. Companies such as Joe Fresh could made a larger profit by decreasing manufacturing costs by outsourcing their labour in countries with more lenient labour laws that didn’t address safe working conditions. The collapse brought negative attention to Joe Fresh forcing them to reevaluate their protocols. Companies with an already strong Triple Bottom Line positively affect every social aspect within the supply chain including fair, livable wages, and safe conditions for factory workers. Organizations have a responsibility to its employees, stakeholders, and inevitably its end users; they should work in the best interest of everyone affected. It’s the employees’ well-being though that tends to be compromised for the sake of the consumer.
Profit
The Triple Bottom Line was originally defined to increase a company’s profit, but it is more than just creating revenue; it looks at the flow of money and the economic sustainability. It takes into account income, job growth, employment distribution, and many more. The profit side dips into the social aspect a bit when it addresses things like wages and incomes of the organizations’ employees. A company that is economically sustainable will take into account its financial success and how the money gets distributed fairly throughout. In a sense it attempts at correcting the problems of capitalism and the growing income gap.
For a world to be financially sustainable there needs to be a balance between earning and buying. That’s not to say that people who earn money shouldn’t spend, because somebody needs to feed the economy; however over consuming and under paying employees leads to income gaps (affecting the social aspect) and inevitably the demand will deplete our earth’s precious resources that we already don’t have enough of.
Planet
The planet is the easiest part to understand so I won’t be expanding on the subtopic too much. The main variables that companies typically take into account include air and water quality, energy consumption, natural resource usage, waste production, and fossil fuel consumption. Everything within a company’s supply chain will affect the environment in one way or another whether it be how they light the factories, ship the products to the suppliers, or even if the packaging of a product can be reused. This is typically the most advertised sector of the Triple Bottom Line because it is the one sector that when put into practice can save a company the most amount of money. This is why so many companies are adopting eco-friendly practices within their supply chain over something equally as important such as income equality.
Now I’m not going to go into what we’re doing right or wrong, and which companies we should buy from or not…that’s for later posts. I wanted to make my readers more educated on the topic and aware that there are multiple aspects of sustainability that people don’t quite know about.
Resources:
http://www.economist.com/node/14301663
Living Sustainably 