Triple Bottom Line

Yesterday I heard about a concept called the "Triple Bottom Line". My first vision was of a large dollar figure underlined three times!

Actually, what it means is that there are three important components to the "bottom line": economic, of course, but also environmental and social. They are trying to implement this approach in Hamilton - interestingly enough, when they evaluated various scenarios for dealing with air quality issues, they found that the impacts on all three aspects of the bottom line were negative for the "status quo".

They also evaluated several options which showed positive effect on all three aspects of the triple bottom line - nice to be able to show that a given approach has a positive impact in terms of more than money!