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When one decides to consider “Going Green”, or looking at “Sustainable Practices”, it can quickly become very confusing.

There is so much information out there that it can become overwhelming. But relax; there are some scientific frameworks that can help you to achieve your sustainability goals, while at the same time considering your short-term and long-term business or community objectives.

The three frameworks that I will address here are: The Triple Bottom Line, Zero Waste, and The Natural Step.

The Triple Bottom Line is pretty straight forward. In decision making, one must consider the People, the Profits, and the Planet. According to our now mainstream Wikipedia, The Triple Bottom Line is made up of ‘Social, Economic, and Environmental’ capital, or the ‘People, Planet, and Profits’.  The People are referred to as the “Human Capital”.  The Planet is referred to as the “Natural Capital”. And the Profits are referred to as the “Economic Capital”. All must remain in proper balance for long-term sustainability.

Zero Waste is a philosophy that encourages the redesign of resource use so that all products are reused or recycled. This is an “Upstream Philosophy”. Zero Waste is a philosophy that combines the elements of resource utilization and product or service design with a focus on the entire life cycle of the product or service. The focus throughout is:

• minimizing virgin resource utilization
• maximizing reuse and recycled resources, service or product delivery with minimal environmental impact
• and end-of-life de-construction resulting in materials that can be reused or recycled through composting or inorganic technical closed-loop cycles

Zero Waste requires design forethought upstream, during product planning, so that resource recovery, recycling and composting downstream can occur with minimal or no waste to bury or burn.

The Natural Step is based on 4 Systems Conditions.

System Condition 1:  In a Sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of substances extracted from earth’s crust.

System Condition 2: In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of substances produced by society.

System Condition 3: In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing degradation by physical means.

System Condition 4; In a sustainable society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.

Working with The Natural Step, each organization or community must draw its own conclusions from these basic principles. In the Natural Step Framework, we utilize a four-step “ABCD process” to provide a systematic way of “backcasting from principles into practice” for sustainability planning and decision-making. This framework can help us sort through the complexity and data by revealing patterns and relationships so that we can make sense of all the information and help our clients to move forward in a more strategic fashion.