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About the Project
Sustainable production processes use natural, human, financial, and technological resources in ways that allow present and future generations to live healthy and productive lives while maintaining the ecological systems that support life. The goal is to improve all parts of the system rather than one dimension at the expense of another.
Many companies are beginning to understand that sustainability is an issue that they need to be concerned about. More significantly, leading companies in a number of industries are coming to realize the strategic advantages of not just considering sustainability but also measuring and reporting their sustainability efforts. However, businesses that are serious about developing more sustainable production processes often lack the tools to guide them in a meaningful way towards sustainability. Similarly, community and non-profit organizations as well as state and local governments need tools to determine the kinds of production they want to encourage and support. The Lowell Center provides practical guidance for creation and use of indicators that communities can use to screen out less desirable production systems and screen in those that are more sustainable.
Sustainabilty indicators go beyond traditional measures of environmental impacts or economic performance to measures that:
• Take into account the interconnections among the environmental, social, and economic systems;
• Integrate environmental and social criteria in addition to traditional economic criteria into corporate decisions about products and materials;
• Can be used as tools to benchmark a company’s long-term sustainability strategies; and
• Guide a company’s decision-making and provide concrete measures of progress towards more sustainable production.
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