Sustainability tools for the chemical industry

Organisations are becoming increasingly aware that they need to look beyond their economic performance and consider environmental and social impacts of their process or product design and development. To meet this need, tools or metrics have been developed to measure progress on the three pillars (economic, environmental and social) of the triple bottom line. The tools allow industry to set goals, benchmark and analyse progress towards their goals. The Bellagio framework indicates, in addition, the tools should be holistic, adopt an adequate time horizon to include interests of future generations and allow for wide and transparent reporting. The chemical industry has invested substantial effort to develop tools, such as BRIDGESworks Metrics, GEMI Metrics Navigator and the IChemE Sustainability Metrics. A framework to assess social impacts has been developed by Labuschagne and Brent for the process industry that has a much broader set of indicators than the metrics, but it too has limitations. Human capital is well covered but social, political and cultural capital are not. This paper presents analysis of the existing tools, using the Bellagio framework. It is shown that each metrics or framework has flaws, and lack consideration of or depth on social issues. More work is needed to develop metrics that adequately address social impacts.