While the concept is not new, the idea of the so-called “triple bottom line” has rapidly spread throughout the business world in recent years. Coined by John Elkington in the mid-1990s and brought to a wider audience in his 1997 book Cannibals with Forks, the triple bottom line represents the alignment of environmental, social and economic sustainability. In an interview with Mother Jones last year, Mr. Elkington described the origination of the concept.

It was 1994 that the phrase “triple bottom line” came into my mind. It wasn’t an easy birthing because I’d been thinking for almost 18 months, trying to come up with a term that would capture what to me was the full business agenda under the sustainability heading. At that time, with the best will in the world in many ways, people like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development were talking about ecoefficiency and basically seeing that as the royal road to sustainability. But I was, I think a number of people were, worried that if you just take financial and environmental, or at least resource efficiency (which is basically what they were doing with the ecoefficiency concept), you were missing out on large clubs of wider sustainability agenda. You were missing out on the economic impacts that companies and business generally have. And you were certainly missing out on the social agenda, which is the Mother Jones space to some considerable degree. That wasn’t totally accidental. I think quite a number of multinational corporations, in particular US corporations, were quite spooked by the whole social agenda and actively steering away from it. So “triple bottom line” was very consciously business language, trying to get under the guard of business people.

By looking at issues through the lens of the triple bottom line, organizations ensure that they assess their progress on social, economic and environmental levels. While the economic piece of the puzzle is measured quantitatively, the environmental and social equity components are ostensibly qualitative attributes. The triple bottom line enables companies to include these difficult to measure, yet vitally important, areas in their decision making. As mentioned in a previous post on Emory University’s sustainability initiatives, the school uses the triple bottom line to evaluate whether or not decision are in their best interest. According to Triple Bottom Line by Andrew W. Savitz (head of Sustainable Business Strategies, a consulting group) with Karl Weber “The Triple Bottom Line is now being taught in business schools all over the world, and over half of U.S. business schools mandate courses in corporate responsibility.” By incorporating this concept into education, schools practice and teach an idea critical to the success of the second green revolution, while ensuring sustainable development.

- Eric Wilson