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Whistle-clean company: Triple Bottom Line

Essay Instructions:

Note: 1- Please analyze the case study and answer the question ONLY PART B 2- The answer of the question should be very logical 3- I don't need introduction or conclusion. Please just answer the question 4-The question and other fie are attached 5- please answer the case study as question and answer.

 

OVERVIEW: Steps to creating business sustainability

 

Business and economic sustainability is considered essential for survival of the human race and for the maintenance of the earth as a habitable environment. Damage is being caused by businesses and that damage needs to be stopped, prevented, and repaired if life as it is currently understood is to prevail. Businesses are a part of modern global society and collectively we owe our existence and survival to the life giving sources of the earth. Hence business activities and outputs must be seen from an eco-social perspective more than they need to be seen from a simple economic perspective. This notwithstanding, businesses certainly have an economic imperative however this imperative is for people in general and not for the business per se. People need the planet to sustain life so that any planet-damaging business activities are therefore not in the best interests of the very people the business is economically serving. Therefore businesses are only valid if they truly serve their primary purposes first and foremost and their economic interests second. For businesses to transform to a new paradigm and stay viable, the following four point plan is considered essential for their development and possibly their survival. A new business paradigm, or zeitgeist, is certainly essential for the survival of humanity as we know it.

 

1. Figure out what phase (or stage) the company is currently at. This is Point A

            Using Dunphy’s six phases

            Phase 1: Don’t know and don’t care

            Phase 2: Aware of the issue, but still don’t care – for many reasons

            Phase 3: Compliance: basically only doing what is legally/formally required

            Phase 4: Efficiency: doing some things better as a cost reduction plan

            Phase 5: Adopting an action plan to become ‘strategically sustainable’ in all dimensions

            Phase 6: Being ideologically sustainable in every aspect of business 

 

 

2. The objective is to raise the company to Phase 5: Strategically Sustainable. This is Point B

Ideally all companies should operate at Phase 6 but this is unrealistic for many businesses as their core operations are unsustainable in the long term (oil, coal etc), or the products they’re producing (cheap plastic goods, disposable batteries, plastic shopping bags etc) are unsustainable.

 

3. Develop a plan to get from Point A to Point B for all the key dimensions of the company.

This involves a deep analysis of everything the business does, all aspects of its operations including production processes, product development, supply chain activities including materials and processes, its marketing and distribution activities, and end-of-life product disposal issues. The plan takes into account all technical, financial, and social dimensions of the business as well as corporate governance and the use of non-renewable non-reusable non-recyclable resources. It also takes into account externalities required for the product to be sustainable as well as all non-beneficial outputs such as GHGs, eco-destruction, and cross-contamination issues. The plan is time framed to allow for all changes to be made on a programmed basis with all costs and benefits captured and dealt with on an ongoing basis.     

 

4. Develop a monitoring system to keep the company at Point B

The monitoring system must address all issues in and of the business and must aim at keeping the business functionally operational on a ‘do no harm’ basis for all its operational, financial, investment, social, societal, and ecological activities. The monitoring system addresses all areas of the business including all upstream, downstream and side-support activities. It assumes responsibility for all chemicals, minerals, elements and parts that are used in manufacturing processes and in all products, and assumes total responsibility for all these issues for the whole-of-life of these issues.  The monitoring system has one boundary and that is from raw material extraction through all processes to ultimate decomposition or reuse of all elements used in all products and all processes. Indicators of performance are generally used and standard indicators such as Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) or self-created indicators can be adopted where the purpose of each indictor is to show conformance to or deviations from all measures of good practice. Along with these indicators a correction plan needs to be developed to ensure performance is auto-checked with a pre-planned correction strategy.

 

OVERVIEW: Steps to creating business sustainability

 

Business and economic sustainability is considered essential for survival of the human race and for the maintenance of the earth as a habitable environment. Damage is being caused by businesses and that damage needs to be stopped, prevented, and repaired if life as it is currently understood is to prevail. Businesses are a part of modern global society and collectively we owe our existence and survival to the life giving sources of the earth. Hence business activities and outputs must be seen from an eco-social perspective more than they need to be seen from a simple economic perspective. This notwithstanding, businesses certainly have an economic imperative however this imperative is for people in general and not for the business per se. People need the planet to sustain life so that any planet-damaging business activities are therefore not in the best interests of the very people the business is economically serving. Therefore businesses are only valid if they truly serve their primary purposes first and foremost and their economic interests second. For businesses to transform to a new paradigm and stay viable, the following four point plan is considered essential for their development and possibly their survival. A new business paradigm, or zeitgeist, is certainly essential for the survival of humanity as we know it.

 

1. Figure out what phase (or stage) the company is currently at. This is Point A

            Using Dunphy’s six phases

            Phase 1: Don’t know and don’t care

            Phase 2: Aware of the issue, but still don’t care – for many reasons

            Phase 3: Compliance: basically only doing what is legally/formally required

            Phase 4: Efficiency: doing some things better as a cost reduction plan

            Phase 5: Adopting an action plan to become ‘strategically sustainable’ in all dimensions

            Phase 6: Being ideologically sustainable in every aspect of business 

 

 

2. The objective is to raise the company to Phase 5: Strategically Sustainable. This is Point B

Ideally all companies should operate at Phase 6 but this is unrealistic for many businesses as their core operations are unsustainable in the long term (oil, coal etc), or the products they’re producing (cheap plastic goods, disposable batteries, plastic shopping bags etc) are unsustainable.

 

3. Develop a plan to get from Point A to Point B for all the key dimensions of the company.

This involves a deep analysis of everything the business does, all aspects of its operations including production processes, product development, supply chain activities including materials and processes, its marketing and distribution activities, and end-of-life product disposal issues. The plan takes into account all technical, financial, and social dimensions of the business as well as corporate governance and the use of non-renewable non-reusable non-recyclable resources. It also takes into account externalities required for the product to be sustainable as well as all non-beneficial outputs such as GHGs, eco-destruction, and cross-contamination issues. The plan is time framed to allow for all changes to be made on a programmed basis with all costs and benefits captured and dealt with on an ongoing basis.     

 

4. Develop a monitoring system to keep the company at Point B

The monitoring system must address all issues in and of the business and must aim at keeping the business functionally operational on a ‘do no harm’ basis for all its operational, financial, investment, social, societal, and ecological activities. The monitoring system addresses all areas of the business including all upstream, downstream and side-support activities. It assumes responsibility for all chemicals, minerals, elements and parts that are used in manufacturing processes and in all products, and assumes total responsibility for all these issues for the whole-of-life of these issues.  The monitoring system has one boundary and that is from raw material extraction through all processes to ultimate decomposition or reuse of all elements used in all products and all processes. Indicators of performance are generally used and standard indicators such as Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) or self-created indicators can be adopted where the purpose of each indictor is to show conformance to or deviations from all measures of good practice. Along with these indicators a correction plan needs to be developed to ensure performance is auto-checked with a pre-planned correction strategy.

Essay Sample Content Preview:

Triple Bottom Line
Name:
Institution:

The whistle clean company offers cleaning services to a variety of customers, ranging from large companies that need their premises cleaned to after functions and events. The idea of the paper recycling business relates to the core business of this company and would go along way into aggregating with the functions of entire company. Given that it is a small company, the tune of $ 27 million dollars annual turnover is good and the number of the staff is also adequate. If it has to improve from the small sized company to a midsized one, some of the aspects would have to change.
With reference to the triple bottom line concept, the business needs to make sure that it satisfies all the three bottom lines for it to be sustainable. In which case it is going to be effectively creating the profit, while at the same time making sure that the staff and the rest of the stakeholders are not exploited and the environmental benefits are visible. From the perspective of the people, the size of the staff that are permanent and that of the casuals is a close indication that the business is quite small (University of Wisconsin, 2014). However, the turnover is quite large and in the future the company should seek to employ more fulltime staff. With respect to the profit, the turnover of $27 million annually is quite commendable given the size of the company.
As for the planet, the stores of the company are located away from the populated areas meaning that they are not posing much danger to the population. This is good practice, as some of the cleaning agents and the chemicals use as well as the waste can contaminate the environment especially the water and the air, with catastrophic effects. This is a crucial concept that ever other business should make sure that they follow up on with policies and practice. In the past most of the businesses calculated the profitability of the economic ventures using the costs and the revenue to come up with the profit. This has since changed due to the fact that most of the business ventures have detrimental effect on the environment and the people even though their profit margin is quite large (Odum, 1974). This in essence is not a profitable business, given that, while it may rake in lots of profit on the balance sheets, it causes a lot of damage to the resources that it uses. As such, for such businesses, the staff and the environment which stand for the human capital and the physical capital respectively are unsustainably exploited for higher financial capital. In the long run this leads to massive losses, not to the company alone but also the affected resources. The 3E (Economy, Energy and Ecology) concept of sustainable development, closely relates to the PPP concept. Every unit of energy that is used by the Whistle-Clean company needs to e accounted for. For the company to be called as sustainable, it needs to reduce waste. Even the source of the energy matters, since most of the energy derived from the fossil fuels leads to the vicious cycle of global warming. Today there are many options of green energy such as the wind energy and solar power that the company can harness for its daily use (HYPERLINK "/author-detail/1007645-mary-logan"Logan, 2014). Ecologically, the aspects of the waste and resource ...
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