Profit has always been the bottom line shared and pursued by each and every businesses since the dawn of time. Consequently, with the nascent development of long-haul transportation and the deployment of large-scale communication infrastructures in the post world-war era, businesses were looking to outsource their production activities to developing countries so as to benefit from their low-wage workforce to, in turn, decrease their operating costs and increase their profits. The break-even point of this shift having occurred when the incurred costs due to transportation and communication was counterbalanced.
However, some of the developing countries wherein assembly lines are outsourced do not necessarily respect the Human Rights, and that’s a euphemism. Therefore ethical issues were and are still raised by customers on the legitimacy of these practices. Seemingly, the daunting spectrum of pollution, global warming, as well as biodiversity and resource depletion due to energy- and material-intensive industries worldwide also led customers to put at doubt the legitimacy of these industrial activities.
Consequently, profit could not possibly be anymore the only pillar against which a company had to report the success of its activities. People and planet were to also be included in the equation. It has to be noted here that the main driving force of this shift were the customers.
Heightened awareness on the necessity to encompass all of these three pillars to measure the success of a business came in 1987 from the Brundtland Commission, known by the name of its Chair Gro Harlem Brundtland (former prime minister of Norway), which was convened by the United Nations in 1983. This commission was created as a result of growing concern "about the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development." Seven years later, the concept of the Triple Bottom Line and its underlying 3P (planet, people and profit) was coined by John Elkington.
From then on, corporations were to be liable not only to the financial health of their activities but also to their environmental footprint and their respect of human rights. More recently, with the ratification of the United Nations and ICLEI TBL standard for urban and community accounting in early 2007, it became the prevailing approach to public sector full cost accounting. In other words, no longer (at least in theory) a company is allowed to pursue its activities without reporting on its impact on the environment and its respect of the Human Rights.
We, at eCO2labs, are blatantly concerned by all these three pillars, be it as a company or as individuals, and we are totally in compliance with each and every of them (see our previous post on how we walk the talk). However our aim is not only to walk the talk but also to share our knowledge on doing so by providing you, through apps and guidelines, with best practices so that you can work on your Triple Bottom Line and measure your performance not only in terms of profit, which is now an outdated and obsolete vision, but also in terms of environmental footprint; this, that you are an individual or a company.
“He who does nothing for fear he can do too little is guilty of complicity” (René Wable)
RW
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