The Triple Bottom Line: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Sustainability has been an often mentioned goal of businesses, nonprofits and governments in the past decade, yet measuring the degree to which an organization is being sustainable or pursuing sustainable growth can be difficult. John Elkington strove to measure sustainability during the mid-1990s by encompassing a new framework to measure performance in corporate America.1 This accounting framework, called the triple bottom line (TBL), went beyond the traditional measures of profits, return on investment, and shareholder value to include environmental and social dimensions. By focusing on comprehensive investment results— that is, with respect to performance along the interrelated dimensions of profits,…