The sustainability is not linked only with the environment, but also, with the social and economic environment, forming so, the three pillars that aim to guarantee the planet’s integrity and to improve the quality of life.
Let’s understand a little more about the three pillars of sustainability:
- Social: it refers to the human capital, as the creation of tools that improve the citizens’ quality of life, laws to support the necessity of the population and the development of improving politics in areas like education, security and leisure. This pillar assumes that the searching for a sustainable society has the idea of having a well-cared and healthy society. Besides, it is important to provide an environment that stimulates the legitimate and healthy work relationship, in order to favor the personal and collective development of all people involved.
- Environmental: the environmental pillar has its roots on the many ways to search for the environmental preservation, the natural resources and the diminishing of the damage caused to the environment during the years. It is on this stage that the companies study the ways to accomplish their operations causing the lowest possible impact to the environment.
- Economic: it refers to subjects about production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. To have sustainability, companies can not profit at the expense of work exploitation or irresponsible and criminal exploitation of the environment. The financial area benefits from sustainable attitudes, because they reduce materials, energy and water, reducing also their bill in the end of the month. In other words, there is a cyclic process of benefits between sustainability and economy.
Through these pillars that evaluate the sustainability of a company, it is possible to identify how close or not an organization is of being sustainable. Therefore, a sustainable company is that that, in the end of its evaluation, maintained its previous development level or promoted activities to improve the level on the three areas.
It is fundamental that the three pillars of sustainability interact among them in a harmonious way, because without these three pillars the sustainability does not support itself. Each one of the pillars show a context in which the sustainability is applied, at the same time that one depends on the other to support themselves.
