The benefits of green business best practices.
A wealth of green business best practices (GBBPs) have been developed to deal with pollution, habitat destruction, and other environmental issues. Many companies are becoming more energy- and resource-efficient as they seek to reduce their impacts on the global climate and on ecosystems in general. They are working with architects, environmental organizations, consultants, and others to purchase greener products; establish effective recycling programs; reduce the detrimental environmental impacts of their facilities and production processes; enhance the environmental benefits of their products; and offset business travel emissions via teleconferencing, telecommuting, establishing ride-share programs, and so forth.

Businesses have made great strides in short order. Recognizing the environmental harm that their activities often inadvertently cause, some companies have embraced a multitude of green business best practices, hired environmental managers, and established workplace teams to baseline, monitor, and improve overall environmental performance. Industrial behemoths like Dupont and Interface have taken long, hard looks at their negative environmental impacts and worked in earnest to reduce those impacts and set new standards for environmental responsibility in their industries.

These companies should be commended for their efforts to reduce their environmental harm and for their desire to be both accountable not only to shareholders but also to their stakeholders, including the environment. They also should be commended for their relative transparency - their willingness to be open with regard to their environmental impacts and their desire for improvement.

However, despite their progress, some businesses, academicians, consultants, and others are beginning to realize that today's green business best practices do not go far enough to result in corporate sustainability. They have played a crucial rule in helping to reduce companies' negative environmental impacts during the transition from our current, non-sustainable business paradigm to a future sustainable one.

Although these GBBPs can be seen as the "low-hanging fruit" in the journey toward sustainability, they cannot be viewed as the solution. In order to be green, companies will need to embark on a very different journey than the one that many have taken thus far. They will need to adopt a new view of the purpose of the company and of the company's relationship with Earth's natural systems. In essence, businesses will need to intentionally partner - for mutual benefit - with the places that they inhabit through their facilities, use for their resources, and affect through their activities.  

Why most best practices don't go far enough.
Most green business best practices do not result in green businesses. Does this mean that they do not make a positive difference? Not at all. It simply means that the scope and tools used in greening often are not broad enough to result in sustainability.

Reason 1: Reducing Harm, Not Restoring Ecosystem Health. Most GBBPs focus only on reducing a firm's environmental harm. As important as it is to reduce harm, such approaches will make sustainability impossible, as anything less than renewing ecosystem health will lead to diminished ecological integrity.

Reason 2: Reduction & Replacement Strategies. Most companies rely on reduction and replacement strategies rather than on ecological renewal. This means that they seek to reduce resource use (generally through efficiency) and to replace toxic or harmful products with less harmful ones. Though these practices are important, they are not enough to result in ecological sustainability.

Reason 3: Environmental Science. Most GBBPs are not grounded in natural science. If uninformed by specific ecosystems, how will companies know if they achieve sustainability or cause additional ecological damage?

Reason 4: Quantitative Tools. GBBPs use almost exclusively quantitative tools and often neglect qualitative aspects of sustainability (e.g., quality of life, human-ecological relations)

Reason 5: Single Scales in Space & Time. Many green business best practices address only single scales in space and time rather than the multiple temporal and spatial scales within and across which ecological relationships occur.

Reason 6: Site-Generic Approaches. Many best practices are generic in their approaches with respect to their sites, meaning that they are not informed or driven by the specific ecological constraints and opportunities of particular sites and ecosystems.

Reason 7: Limited Perspective. Most best practices are not multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary, thereby resulting in a limited perspective and approach to the greening of business.

Reason 8: Entire Company. Companies using GBBPs often fail to incorporate every element of the company - defined here as its mission, employees, operations, facilities and sites, and products and services - in their greening efforts.