A new tool brings the triple bottom line into focus.

The quality of corporate environmental reports is patchy--they often lack hard data and key triple bottom line indicators of social, environmental and economic performance.

A universal standard for environmental and social auditing is becoming critical to improving the quality of CSR (corporate social responsibility) reporting by establishing measurable minimum requirements and allowing comparative reporting across individual companies or whole industry sectors.

The US-based Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (1) is currently the most widely recognised ethical reporting standard, but more granular standards are increasingly needed in some sectors.

In Australia, the University of Sydney has worked with commercial developer Dipolar to create a new software tool called [Bottomline.sup.3] or [BL.sup.3] (pronounced 'cubed'). The tool enables companies to generate triple bottom line reports from financial data, without the need for additional data collection.

For example, a company wanting to assess its S[O.sub.2] contributions might start with a set of account items such as stationery, paper, petrol, electricity, gas, insurance, car rental etc. By providing a value of, say, $100 for paper purchased, [BL.sup.3] would calculate how many kilograms of S[O.sub.2] are embodied in $100 worth of paper, and so on.

Stephen Gale, Projects Leader Sustainability for Hatch, an engineering consultancy to the mining industry, says Hatch is using [BL.sup.3] for its own reporting and that of its clients.

'The problem to date with Triple Bottom Line (TBL) reporting has been cost and the lack of a good standard methodology for allocating all impacts,' says Mr Gale, who believes that [BL.sup.3] is most suited to medium-large organisations.

'[BL.sup.3] goes much deeper into supply-chain analysis than conventional reporting tools. It acts like a full life-cycle analysis on every item a company procures and sums this to a total impact and allocates a fair share of the national impacts to the company.

'The benefit of this is that it becomes immediately apparent where supply chain risks and opportunities exist.

'For instance, [BL.sup.3] has shown that for Hatch to improve our C[O.sub.2] footprint we need to focus on paper consumption as the total paper carbon footprint is several times that of our direct C[O.sub.2] emissions.

'[BL.sup.3] goes well beyond GRI reporting. The supply chain and impacts are laid out like a map whereas conventional reporting merely provides a few unconnected shreds.

'It is only by having this level of transparency that society can choose how to spend its ecological inheritance.'

Contact: Stephen Gale, [e-mail]

More information: [Bottomline.sup.3]:www.bottomline3.com

(1) www.globalreporting.org