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S-BAR Sustainable Business Achievement Ratings About S-BAR

Situation Analysis

Since the 1990s, government, industry, and nonprofit organizations have created dozens of voluntary environmental and social standards that focus on products, facilities, and company operations. These cover a wide spectrum of policies, practices, and performance on issues such as marine and forest stewardship, energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction, sweatshop labor and worker rights, business ethics, minority purchasing, community investment, board diversity, and many others.

Some of these -- such as the LEED green building standard, the Energy Star label, the Ethical Trading Initiative, the Global Reporting Initiative, the ISO 14001 environmental management standard, the SA 8000 human rights standard, and the United Nations Global Compact -- have become widely implemented and recognized. There are hundreds of other standards at the global, national, regional, and local levels.

However, while many of the pieces are in place to identify aspects of “good” companies, they are neither comprehensive nor add up to a coherent whole. As a result, there is no means for customers and consumers to know the full measure of an entire company’s environmental and social performance. And companies have no means of understanding and undertaking the full complement of society’s growing expectations of them to be environmentally and socially responsible.

S-BAR bridges this gap by creating a clear and condensed standards framework that incorporates and builds on lessons learned and systems created over the past two decades by hundreds of nonprofit organizations, trade associations, investment and academic institutions, and government agencies.  In the process, S-BAR creates a level playing field – a unified calculus that answers the questions: “How good is ‘good enough’?” “How good are we now?” and “What will it take for us to be viewed credibly as a ‘sustainable business’?

At a time when society is increasingly expecting companies to act environmentally and socially responsible, or “good”, S-BAR steps forward to create a path for companies to determine and improve their “sustainable worth”, and offers consumers the opportunity to learn about the practices and choices behind the businesses they’ve come to depend upon.