Companies wishing to realise broader societal and environmental objectives often chose Triple Bottom Line (TBL) accounting as a reporting approach, covering social, economic and environmental indicators and thus enabling decision-makers to quantify trade-offs between different facets of sustainability. Two issues are critical when considering TBL accounting. First, indicators must include both the direct (on-site, immediate) effects of the company as well as the indirect (off-site, upstream, embodied) effects associated with purchasing from a potentially large and distant web of suppliers. The incorporation of all indirect or
upstream impacts removes problems related to the choice of boundaries. Second, it is important to address the question of how to assign responsibility for the indirect impacts as they are shared between all partners in a supply chain and must not be double-counted.

 

The research question of this work is therefore "how can corporate sustainability performance be quantified and compared in practice, whilst taking into account the responsibility sharing nature of trading and avoiding double-counting of impacts?". The authors a) describe the analytical approach to measure the indirect impacts of a comprehensive Triple Bottom Line account of a producing entity, b) present a quantitative concept of shared responsibility as a solution to assigning responsibility to both producers and consumers, in a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive way, and c) demonstrate practical applications in examples of quantification of indirect impacts, supply chain contributions and shared responsibility.