Indicators of Sustainable Business Practices

Abstract

IntroductionSince the end of the 1990s, businesses have started to systematically consider environmental problems in terms of different positions and levels within a firm, such as design, purchase, sale, and disposal (Welford, 2000).The United Kingdom published BS 7750, a standardized specification for an environmental management system in 1994 and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published ISO 14001 -an environmental management standard in 1996.The main goal of these standards is to help all kinds of organizations to establish and implement environmental management systems by systematically setting up environmental policies, practices, objectives, and targets.The number of organizations with ISO 14001 certification around the world rapidly increased to 13,368 in December of 1999 to 129,031 in December of 2006 (Corporate Risk Management Company, 2000:2007).Welford (2000) insisted that Environmental Management Systems (EMSs), such as ISO 14001, are no longer options.However, there are some problems with EMSs.The ISO 14001 standard does not promote the flexibility needed to handle continuously changing environmental issues (Moxen & Strachan, 1998).The ISO 14001 mostly depends on action control and results based on environmental impacts, rather than social and ethical control.Thompson (2002) pointed out three areas of ISO 14001 that should be described: (i) social aspects and impacts and how to control them; (ii) guidelines for a set of widely recognized and accepted environmental performance principles; and (iii) a method to communicate environmental performance information to external stakeholders and decision makers.To address these areas, businesses should go even further than environmental management systems and completely integrate all the components of sustainable development into a new way of doing business (Welford, 2000).In addition, a variety of interested parties, such as governments, "green" consumers, and "green" investors, are also encouraging firms to incorporate their environmental management systems and sustainable development into their decision-making process for sustainable business practices and/or strategies.Companies could implement sustainable business practice to meet these demands for interested parties on sustainable business.To effectively implement sustainable business practices, firms need to know the kinds of indicators that meet the characteristics or concepts of sustainable business practices.Based on these needs, we aims to identify whether or not firms have applied sustainable business practices based on the Triple Bottom Line (Environmental, economic, and social www.intechopen.com

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