What Is Sustainability?
Sustainability focuses on meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The concept of sustainability is composed of three pillars: economic, environmental, and social—also known informally as profits, planet, and people.
Sustainability is important for many reasons including:
- Environmental Quality – In order to have healthy communities, we need clean air, natural resources, and a nontoxic environment.
- Healthcare – Sustainability and healthcare are intricately related since the quality of our environment affects public health.
This page gives many examples of how sustainability is in our everyday existence without us being aware of it, and how it impacts on our attitude and approach to the environment.
Sustainable Hotels
Sustainability has been a growing focus for hoteliers in the last 10 years. This is good news for all of us, as the hospitality industry has had a significant impact on the environment due to its rate of water consumption as well as hotels’ use of consumable goods and energy.
Many hotels, restaurants and tourism establishments already have some system in place for sorting and collecting everyday waste items such as bottles, cans, cardboard and paper for reuse or recycling.
What gets measured gets managed. Hotels need to know the answers to the following to set their sustainability agenda:
- Their current waste position.
- Pinpoint their carbon footprint
- How to create a zero waste to landfill policy
- How to access their energy and water usage.
As the expectations on corporate responsibility increase, and as transparency becomes more prevalent, companies are recognizing the need to act on sustainability. Professional communications and good intentions are no longer enough. Change impacts.
Sustainable – Green Business
A sustainable business, or a green business, is an enterprise that has minimal negative impact, or potentially a positive effect, on the global or local environment, community, society, or economy—a business that strives to meet the triple bottom line.
Companies that incorporate sustainable practices into the day-to-day running of their business, where environmental performance leads to improved resource efficiency and direct cost savings and can also increase access to customers who are increasingly demanding more environmentally friendly products and services. Better environmental performance will also increase the agility and resilience of the company to the climate. Simply put, sustainability is a business approach to creating long-term value by taking into consideration how a given organization operates in the ecological, social, and economic environment. Sustainability is built on the assumption that developing such strategies foster company longevity.
What are Sustainable Business Practices?
Sustainable Business Practice Examples:
- Be Intentional About Sustainability. As with any other business initiative, you need to create a plan of action and assign accountability. Hold people accountable and measure the results. Once that is done, do it again. This will create momentum in your efforts.
- Partner with Employees. Employees are at the frontline with customers and carrying out the mission of your business including the sustainability agenda of the company.
- Water and Energy Conservation. Water conservation leads to energy conservation.
- Supply Chains. A supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product or service. The entities in the supply chain include producers, vendors, warehouses, transportation companies, distribution centres, and retailers.
- Develop a Recycling Program. Select a recycling coordinator. practice waste prevention. set up a collection program. Manage and measure the programme.
- Chemical Management. A Chemical Management System is a process that ensures proper compliance with safety, environmental and food safety policy.
- Purchase Only Energy Efficient Products. Timers and thermostats, Lighting, controls, and sensors. An investment in energy efficiency – however small – will help drive increased competitiveness and build resilience to the headwinds of market uncertainty and energy price volatility.
- Develop Sustainability Work Policies. Sustainable development is based on three main elements: uniform economic growth, protection and preservation of the environment, and respect and improvement of social and human rights.
As with any other business initiative, you need to create a plan of action and assign accountability. Hold people accountable and measure the results. Once that is done, do it again. This will create momentum in your efforts.
Business Sustainability
Business sustainability is essential to the long-term prosperity of global companies. These sustainability principles serve to maximize their opportunities and to minimize the negative impact their core operations have on the environment, and the communities and economies in places where they operate in.
Sustainability in Business Examples
Harnessing wind energy to provide power for homes, offices, and other buildings or to pump water is one of the best examples of sustainable development. After all, wind is a free resource.
- REDUCE. The best way to improve sustainability management is to create as little waste as possible by not purchasing it to begin with.
- RECOVER. You need to set up systems to collect and sort the waste so that it can be reused or recycled.
- REUSE. Consideration will need to be given to where certain items can be reused, or whether they can be donated to organisations outside the business that can reuse them.
- RECYCLE. Have you considered all the waste your business generates and what else might be recycled?
Corporate Sustainability
The Importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become one of the standard business practices of our time. For companies, the overall aim is to achieve a positive impact on society while maximising the creation of shared value for the owners of the business, its employees, shareholders, and stakeholders.
For companies committed to Corporative Social Responsibility (CSR) means kudos and an enhanced overall reputation – a powerful statement of what they stand for in an often-cynical business world.
CSR Goals.
- Positive impact in the community
- Better brand recognition
- Supports public value outcomes
- Improves financial performance
- Builds trust & confidence
- Organisational growth
The Importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become one of the standard business practices of our time.
Sustainable infrastructure refers to the designing, building, and operating of these structural elements in ways that do not diminish the social, economic, and ecological processes required to maintain human equity, diversity, and the functionality of natural systems. Sustainable infrastructure can refer to ‘green’ or ‘smart’ buildings. More broadly it can encompass a wide range of initiatives with a specific focus on energy, water, and land management; green areas; smart technology and the use of sustainable, durable building materials. Infrastructure is critical to sustainable community development, our future well-being, and the day-to-day lives of individuals. The infrastructure we are building today will shape tomorrow’s communities.
Sustainable Manufacturing
To face the challenges confronting us today, we need to change the way we produce and consume goods. We need to create more value while using fewer inputs, reduce costs and minimise impacts on the environment. We need to do more with less.
More efficient production processes and better environmental management systems can significantly reduce pollution and waste and save water and other resources. This is good for business too, as it can cut operating costs and reduce dependency on raw materials.
Eco-design and eco-innovation can ease the impacts of producing goods. They can help improve the overall environmental performance of products throughout their life cycle, and boost demand for better production technologies.
Sustainable Food
Food is essential to life. It also forms an important part of our cultural identity and plays an important role in the economy. People are aware that the food they eat is an important factor affecting their health, but what is less well known is the impact producing and consuming food has on the world’s resources.
Alongside the cars we drive and the energy we use to heat our houses, the food we produce and consume has a significant impact on the environment through, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, the use of land and water resources, pollution, depletion of phosphorus, and the impact of chemical products such as herbicides and pesticides.
We must transform our food system to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring sustainable food production systems by 2030 and the European Union’s long term sustainability goal of ‘living well, within the limits of the planet’ by 2050.
