An overview of environmental sustainability

While sustainability may be about the future of our society, for today’s industries and businesses, it is about commercial success. Sustainability is absolutely about marketing and branding. It shows that businesses respect environmental limits while fulfilling social wants and needs.

Benefit of Sustainability Reporting are:

• Increased awareness of risks and opportunities
• Appreciation of the link between financial and non-financial performance
• Improved long-term management strategy and business planning
• Streamlining processes, reducing costs and improving efficiency
• Reduced risk of environmental failures
• Comparing performance internally, and between companies and sectors
• Mitigating, or reversing, negative environmental impacts; and
• Improving reputation and brand loyalty

Economic, social, and environmental areas are the three areas of sustainability that are used to define the complete sustainability issue. At Joshi Environmental, Inc. (JEI), we focus on the environmental area and environmental performance.

Benchmarking Environmental Performance

Every industry faces unique challenges and tradeoffs related to sustainability. Carbon Dioxide benchmarking, or GHG benchmarking, is the most commonly used metric. Other benchmarking areas include:

• reduction of hazardous materials
• water use, and
• energy use

Measuring Carbon foot print

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, developed by World Resources Institute (WRI) and World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD), is considered the global standard for how to measure, manage, and report greenhouse gas emissions. Most companies use this protocol to maintain conformity in measurement and so that comparing between facilities, competitors, and the industry becomes straight forward.

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol

You need to identify which activities in your organization are responsible for GHG emissions being released into the atmosphere. The most widely accepted approach is to identify and categorize emissions-releasing activities into three groups. The three scopes are:

Scope 1: Activities owned or controlled by your organization that release emissions straight into the atmosphere. They are direct emissions. Examples of scope 1 emissions include emissions from combustion boilers, furnaces, and fleet vehicles; emissions from process equipment.

Scope 2: Emissions being released into the atmosphere associated with consumption of purchased electricity, heat, steam and cooling. These are indirect emissions that are a consequence of the organization’s activities but which occur at sources not owned or controlled.

Scope 3: Scope 3 emissions are all indirect emissions, not included in scope 2, that occur in the value chain, including both upstream and downstream emissions. Scope 3 emissions includes a number of different sources of GHG including employee commuting, business travel, third-party distribution and logistics, production of purchased goods, emissions from the use of sold products, and several more.

Conclusion

Small- and medium-sized business that integrate sustainability into their core business strategy can benefit from lower costs, reduced risk, and new opportunities.

If you have any questions, or would like to develop sustainability benchmarks for your facility, contact Sam Joshi at (215) 389-2811.