Emerald, Olive or Lime – How Green Is Green? |
Environmental sustainability is achieving a significant level of visibility and strategic importance today among U.S. corporations. Although this is a positive development, there remains a need to credibly measure an organization’s actual and comparable progress toward environmental sustainability. Currently, there are no generally accepted audit processes, reporting metrics or rating systems available to assess a company’s environmental impact. Deloitte, in an effort to devise a consistent set of tools to meet these needs, proposes a “Sustainability Framework” that can be applied in any green-oriented business enterprise.
Consumers today are becoming more and more environmentally conscious, and their purchasing decisions are being influenced by how the organizations they buy from mitigate environmental impact. Green-compliant corporations are now forced to monitor their progress toward environmental sustainability and to be able to showcase it. A standardized Sustainability Framework would provide a consistent methodology for devising and measuring green strategic plans and results with respect to Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) relationships.
The Sustainability Framework standard needs to:
- Span the breadth of current environmental issues for actions that are measurable and reportable
- Retain flexibility of measures to accommodate future needs and developments
- Be adaptable to different industries
- Provide cross-enterprise measurements
- Be able to rank comparative measures within industries
B2B and B2C relationships will benefit from a consistent tool that demonstrates comparable results between organizations, constituting a valued standard across all industries.
Authors:
Sequana Blondell is an enterprise applications manager
Jonathan Craven is an enterprise applications senior consultant
Rakesh Duggal is a former enterprise applications consultant
As used in this document, Deloitte means Deloitte LLP [and its subsidiaries]. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries.
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Measuring Environmental Sustainability
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