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S-BAR Sustainable Business Achievement Ratings About S-Bar

Overview

Sustainable Business Achievement Ratings (S-BAR) is the first comprehensive system with a market-based, broadly applicable, and transparent means of assessing a company’s environmental, economic and social performance.

With no standards for what constitutes a “sustainable business”, companies have no consistent set of benchmarks to determine how good is “good enough” when it comes to customer and stakeholder expectations. Customers -- businesses, government agencies, and consumers -- face a daunting patchwork of unregulated and inconsistent claims about companies’ environmental and social performance. The result is that customers are wary and confused, and companies are unclear as to which are the “right” actions to take.

Currently, the growth of the sustainable business economy is critically hampered by the lack of such standards, and the marketplace confusion that results.

The Sustainable Business Achievement Rating system – S-BAR – creates the pathway forward.

Over the next five years, S-BAR will:

  • Develop and standardize the concept of what is means to be a “sustainable business” so that it is an understood and attainable goal
  • Establish a unified standard developed by a transparent, consensus-driven stakeholder process, incorporating and building on appropriate existing ratings systems
  • Create and implement “good-better-best” standards covering five key business sustainability indicators: Governance and Management; Environment; Workplace; Marketplace; and, Community
  • Create a common vocabulary between companies and suppliers for what “sustainable business” means
  • Provide customers – business and institutional buyers as well as individuals – the tools to make informed purchasing decisions
  • Provide a roadmap for continuous improvement
  • Provide a means of rewarding leadership companies in the marketplace

With Phase I completed and Phase II underway, the S-BAR Leadership Team is currently engaged in a fundraising effort to complete the design and vetting of the system.  If you are interested in contributing to or learning more about this fundraising effort, let us know you want to Participate.

 

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