Safe Companies: An Alternative Approach to Operationalizing Sustainability

The track record of the past decade shows that sustainability has had a difficult time getting traction inside corporations. In large measure, this is because it is a fuzzy and unproven concept – business executives require clarity to move forward. One way around this hurdle is by focusing on safety, which can provide an effective platform for helping companies make the transition to sustainability. In many ways, the two concepts are quite similar. Both are about increasing the prospects for human health and happiness. Yet, unlike sustainability, safety is well understood and actionable, and it is also an increasingly high priority in our post-9-11 era. A focus on safety provides senior executives a path up a Safety-Sustainability Continuum that starts with the workplace and proceeds to traditional functional business areas such as safer R&D and correspondingly products. Ultimately this leads to activities that are intended not only to reduce a company's negative “footprint” (for instance, by making products less toxic) but by expanding their positive “footprint”, (e.g. by pursuing ecosystem restoration and regeneration). Ideally, a campaign to use safety as an entry point for operationalizing sustainability will have a dual emphasis, focusing equally on the human benefits of safety and the business case for pursuing safety (and, ultimately, sustainability).