Some may think that “sustainability” is a very recent concept but it was back in 1987 that local visionary John Elkington established SustainAbility as a strategic consultancy and independent think tank specialising in the business risks and market opportunities of corporate responsibility and sustainable development. Mr Elkington, who is credited with coining the term “green consumer”, originally worked from home, then took offices in Notting Hill but eventually (after stints in Kensington High Street and Hyde Park Corner) moved to premises in Bedford Row, Bloomsbury. In addition, the think-tank now has offices in Washington, DC, and Zurich, Switzerland.
What does SustainAbility do? As John puts it, “We work with leading companies, NGOs and influencers around the world. Our multi-disciplinary team, with people from at least ten nations, works to clear rules of engagement to achieve traction and change. We also have a global network of experts and partners to give us antennae and footholds around the world.”
John, who now holds the title Chief Entrepreneur, was described by Business Week in 2004 as "a dean of the corporate-responsibility movement for three decades."
The same year SustainAbility was founded, John published his sixth book, The Green Capitalists, followed by The Green Consumer Guide the following year. The guide sold one million copies, was published alongside the launch of SustainAbility-organised Green Consumer Week, and became the first of a series of consumer-focused books. SustainAbility was on the map.
John and his former colleague Julia Hailes were elected to the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour for their “outstanding environmental achievements”. Both invested a significant slice of their book royalties in SustainAbility.
In 1989, SustainAbility signed up the first of what became a series of international clients, including Dow Europe, Procter & Gamble and Novo Nordisk. Work began on The Environmental Audit report with WWF, which helps spur rapid growth in environmental auditing. SustainAbility emerged as a key player in the field.
In 1990, as the client base grew, SustainAbility’s offices moved from the Elkington family home to a shared office near Notting Hill. The company made three more moves before choosing premises in Bloomsbury in 2003.
Through the early 1990s, John and his colleagues continued to work hard to combine cutting edge insight on societal trends with growing consulting demands. For example, one project involved recycling of polymers which are used extensively in the auto and packaging sectors. Of course, at the time, packaging was not generally recognized as the critical issue it is now
In 1993, working with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), SustainAbility published Coming Clean, its first survey of corporate environmental reports. The company also launched The LCA Sourcebook, pulling together work in the area of life-cycle assessment and new product development.
In 1994, the company began to develop the ‘waves’ model of social change and the concept of the ‘triple bottom line’: People, Planet, Profit.
John Elkington says that this led to evolution of the client portfolio from a predominantly environmental one to “one with a wider focus on the economic, social and environmental dimensions of business and market performance”.
In 1995, a difficult decision had to be made as Shell Oil unintentionally came to symbolise the social and environmental aspects of the Triple Bottom Line challenge because of the Brent Spar and Nigerian controversies. While SustainAbility worked with a growing number of companies, it declined to work with Shell.
By the late 1990s, turnover began to exceed £500,000 and the company decided to work with Shell, advising on their new ‘Profit and Principles’ report series and the underlying strategy. However, SustainAbility stopped working with Monsanto. “They resisted our advice on societal tensions in Europe with regard to GM technology,” John explains.
In 1999, The New Foods Guide was published, signalling new interest at SustainAbility in the agriculture, food and health sectors, and in supply chain traceability. This was followed by a series of sector reports, first on the oil industry, then on automobiles and life sciences.
Today SustainAbility is well known for its Global Reporters benchmark survey, The Global Reporters – a tracking of the way companies report on sustainability issues. The first survey was published in 2000, the latest in November 2006, in association with the UN and Standard & Poor’s.
In 2001, the company broke the £1 million turnover mark (£1.375m) and opened its first overseas office in New York. More books and reports were published,
and the company began to campaign on transparency in corporate lobbying – leading to projects with The Green Alliance, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.
In 2002, SustainAbility participated in the World Economic Forum for the first time, and has done so ever since, and the next year new offices were opened in Zurich and San Francisco - while the New York office relocated to Washington, DC. By 2005, the company was exceeding £2 million in turnover and continues to grow worldwide from its Bloomsbury base.
What does John think of Bloomsbury as a base? “At first I was horrified when I heard Holborn was the final choice for our new offices,” he says, “because I cycle to work from Barnes – and this was quite a way further on from Hyde Park Corner. But the team loves the area and we are particularly in love with the extraordinary trees in Bedford Row. They smell glorious when in flower. Can anyone tell us what they are?”