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John Elkington's Adoption Of Sustainability Reporting

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There are many factors that have been driving many corporations towards the adoption of sustainability reporting. According to Elkington, these can be categorized into three waves starting from 1960 to the present that have shaped the environmental agenda. The first wave began in 1960’s and brought an understanding of the environmental impacts corporations have on the world. This resulted in the creation of new environmental legislation which caused corporations to focus more on compliance with these new rules. The second wave, known as the ‘Green’ wave originated in 1988 and brought a realization that news methods of production technology and new products that focus on sustainability are needed. The way to go about doing this would have to …show more content…

It is an important platform for communicating both positive and negative sustainability performance and impacts. It allows companies to be transparent about the risks and opportunities they face which allows for better decision making for the company. There are currently multiple providers of sustainability reporting guidelines such as the Global Reporting Initiative, The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, The United Nations Global Compact, and The International Organization for Standardization (“About Sustainability Reporting”). Although these various guidelines are not the same, they are beginning to standardize a method for reporting on non-financial data similar to the way that financial data is currently …show more content…

Triple bottom line is often synonymous with other types of sustainability reporting methods such as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and CSR (corporate social responsibility). The popularity of his framework in the mid-1990s helped spark the creation of the many standards listed earlier (Norman and MacDonald, 244). According to Elkington, the idea of the framework originated when he was looking for a new language to express what they saw as an inevitable expansion of the environmental agenda that his consulting company, SustainAbility, had mainly focused on. Instead of trademarking the term, Elkington did the exact opposite and made it so that no one could protect it to ensure that it would become widely used. In addition to the triple bottom line framework, Elkington developed the saying “people, planet and profits” which is known as the 3P formulation (Elkington, “Enter the Triple Bottom Line”

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