Triple bottom line – not just a business gimmick
Economic, social and environmental. But economic does not always mean profit. At least not in the sense a new environmentally conscious economic paradigm would put it.
Think for a second. What if the products you bought at the supermarket not only had nutrition labels on it – but environmental footprint labels. This means, what kind of environmental footprint the making of that plastic water bottle had. That means, to what distances my banana traveled to get to my grocery bag (re-usable one of course!) And finally, if a product’s prices reflected that.
This is what Kalle Lasn suggests in her article “A New Kind of Global Marketplace”.
When we speak of, in business school, to have an integrated strategy to put forward the idea of environmental sustainability, I don’t believe anything can be as effective as making concerns for the environment a habit – like putting on our seatbelt. A simple way to go about this is to change what fundamentally drives the market – prices. No other strategy can be more so integrated than incessantly measuring environmental as well as economic impact, especially when it is imperative to reflect environmental impact in the pricing of a product. This type of sustainability will ensure that as the word sustainability truly means – to allow our future generations to reap the same economic benefits from our natural resources as our generation can now.