What Does Sustainability Mean to You?
Fri, Nov 21, 2008
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This week, leading professional and corporate consultancy Spada released new research on environmental reporting, which shows FTSE100 companies are more than vague when using environmental terms and concepts.
Only two of 79 leading corporate organizations were able to define what they meant by sustainability – BP and British American Tobacco – while the others claimed “operational flexibility”, and so avoided a concise definition.
Considering the actions of many large institutions recently, i.e. the banks, it’s obvious their practices are anything but sustainable – in trading terms – so how could they possibly define what they mean by sustainability?
Spada are calling for globally recognized standards in environmental reporting and hope to see more clarity and transparency from companies when discussing sustainable practices. Don’t we all?
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1 Trackbacks For This Post
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karma footprints :: Sustainability… erm…? Says:
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:50 pm[...] Corporate consultancy Spada’s research on environmental reporting showed FTSE100 companies were more than a little clueless when explaining environmental terms and concepts. [...]
December 8th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
If there’s a company that needs to understand the meaning of sustainability, it’s Chevron. Chevron is acting like it has done nothing wrong in the rainforest of Ecuador, where Texaco (Chevron bought Texaco in 2001) dumped over 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic water into the streams. Today the drinking water is contaminated and over 1,000 people have died from cancer and thousands more are sick with skin disease and respiratory illness. If you want to find out more about what is surely the largest environmental disaster on the planet, read this blog, http://www.thechevronpit.blogspot.com and this article, http://www.http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2008/11/ecuador-keeps-u.html
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:37 am
I think a lot of people today want to say they are running a buisness in a sustainable way to become part of the trend instead of doing something good for the earth. Many of these people may not know the true defintion of sustainability and therefore can’t define how they using resources sustainably. It’s said when you realize how many people just care about themselves and making as much money as possible for themselves. They never stop to think about how what they do today effects all of their descendents in the future.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Amidst this confusion, there are so many common misconceptions surrounding sustainability. Check out our new myth-busting video “What’s Your Big Green Lie?!” which gives a taste of the widespread ignorance of green issues at http://www.biggreenlies.com. Thanks!
April 30th, 2009 at 2:32 am
The basic definition of sustainability is very easy- it’s using materials in a responsible way so that we don’t run out of them. Any other definition is just a company slightly modifying its behavior and making no real change, but generating good press.