Guy Dauncey is an environmental pioneer. He’s one of the good guys. As president of the British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association, he continues to accomplish many great deeds for the cause of sustainability, such as the British Columbia provincial government’s Solar Hot Water Acceleration Project. Mr. Dauncey is quoted widely and one of his current recurring themes is that of the Triple Bottom Line.
Simply put, we sustainability experts know that businesses which go green and stay that way expose themselves to additional opportunities which conventional businesses could not seize. Capsulated into a single concept, this is the triple bottom line (TBL).
Born of green office building innovations, the TBL is the intersection of economic success, social equity and environmental sustainability. Think of it as holistic sustainability. Companies which excel at the TBL enter a market segment known as eco-luxury.
A distant cousin of eco-tourism, eco-luxury is a group of goods and services for clients who wish to engage in green commerce and for whom price is a secondary consideration. I will cover this growing trend in future posts but I wanted to make you aware of the scope of the movement today because it refers back quite nicely to its origins, green office building innovations.
It is a documented fact that green buildings produce more efficient workers. How could anyone argue with an incentive like that, either for green office building innovations or green homes?
In terms of the mechanics of measuring the triple bottom line, it begins with what John Knox, a prominent authority on economic and land use development, refers to as optimum value engineering, a somewhat complex but compelling formula of determining when in a project visioning stage to begin calculating and adapting for the three pillars of TBL as itemized above.
Without delving too deeply into the weeds of real estate computations, allow me to leave you with this: if we think of a business as a living, breathing entity, it can’t help but be healthier if we give it the proper diet and exercise of triple bottom line sustainability.
Productive workers plus a broader client base plus more efficient operations must equal the potential for greater profits. That’s the type of eco-luxury which most any successful business can afford to indulge.
Sustainable Justice For All!
Corbett Kroehler
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