How sustainable is your business?
If your business has not looked at its sustainability, you need to start by identifying which areas are most significant to your activities and what you want to achieve. If your business is already tackling sustainability, you need to regularly review and update the analysis of its sustainability impact, the general economic analysis and the stakeholder analysis.
To identify where to focus your efforts, you need to consider all elements to ensure that your sustainability work is credible. Sustainability tends to be divided into three dimensions: economic, ecological (environmental) and social sustainability. You need to ensure that environmental sustainability is not at the expense of social aspects, and economic growth must be incorporated within both environmental and social aspects.
What specific actions can your business implement?
The global Sustainable Development Goals in the UN’s Agenda 2030 can serve as a useful starting point when familiarising yourself with all aspects involved in sustainability. The most important thing is to break things down into specifics, so you can explain exactly what you are going to do to contribute to sustainable development.
If your business manufactures or sells products, the biggest impact on sustainability typically comes from production or use of the product. The extent of impact on sustainability for service businesses differs depending on what service is being offered, but, in general, activities with a significant impact on sustainability include business travel, purchasing and transport of goods, energy use, waste and pension saving.
What impact does your business have on the environment?
Many companies are interested in calculating their climate impact. It might be an interest in emissions that occur during a certain process, emissions that occur from the entire value chain for a product or service, or emissions that come from an entire operation. There are different ways to calculate the company's climate impact. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency describes the different ways, and also what is important to consider when each perspective is used.
Calculate the climate impact at naturvardsverket.se (in Swedish)
You can also begin by identifying the areas in which your industry needs to reduce its impact on sustainability. You can often find this kind of information via your trade association or in sustainability reports from larger companies within your industry. You can also search for information in Fossil Free Sweden’s roadmaps for different industries.
Roadmaps on fossilfrittsverige.se
Analyse which areas you should focus on
If you want a more in-depth analysis of what sustainability areas your business should focus on, you can conduct a stakeholder analysis. A stakeholder analysis aims to understand how the business’ customers, funders, suppliers and other stakeholders are affected (both positively and negatively) by the three sustainability perspectives: economic, environmental and social.
You may also need to analyse your business environment to identify opportunities for and risks to the development of your business. General economic analyses are important in a changing world. Reading about what is happening in the world from a political, economic, technical, social and environmental perspective is a useful way of enabling you to act at the right time in the event of new circumstances or trends.
By discovering what is not sustainable, you have great scope for actively eliminating or minimising this and instead conducting activities in a way that contributes to positive future development.
Governance of sustainability work
In order to manage sustainability work, you need to draw up a policy document. The simplest option may be to formulate an environmental policy that includes procedures for how the business handles waste, staff travel, electricity and energy, chemicals, and transport, etc.
If your business is slightly larger, an environmental management system may be a useful way to create structure for sustainability work. Your environmental management system does not necessarily need to be certified, but can be presented in a standard document. The requirements included in an environmental management system vary between different industries and depending on requirements set by customers.
Create a work environment policy
In order to create a safe, secure and pleasant work environment, for both yourself and your employees, you can formulate protocols in an HR policy or work environment policy. This kind of policy usually covers health and work environment, equality and diversity, employee participation, and how employees can have an influence on their work and their opportunities for development.
Legislation in the area of sustainability
It may be that your company, directly or indirectly, is affected by future or existing EU legislation in the area of sustainability. The industry organization Företagarna has produced short summaries of relevant regulations. They can give you as an entrepreneur an overview of the requirements that apply now and what requirements are expected to come, future requirements and how they can affect small and medium-sized businesses.
Learn more about making your business sustainable
Below you will find additional information if you wish to delve deeper into the three sustainability perspectives: economic, ecological (environmental) and social sustainability. It may concern the state of the social work environment and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's manual to formulate an environmental policy. There are also questions to consider specifically for this area.
More questions to consider
Here you find all the questions from the pages on sustainability work.