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Please read and respond to the below post in your own words.
Make sure to cite any evidence you use to support your ideas.
Do you agree or disagree with your peer’s initial post? Why or why not?
What examples from the textbook or outside resources (such as news articles) support or dispute your peer’s stance, and how?
Did your peer provide any insight or information that changed your opinion about the TBL? If so, how?
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**Respond to this post**
Do you think that it is the responsibility of businesses to track and manage the social, economic, and environmental impacts of their actions? Why or why not?
In response to this question, I just want to mention a movie I watched that had an impact on me and my view of this subject. Dark Water was released in 2019 and it dramatized the legal battle a farmer had against the local DuPont factory. If you have not seen it, I would highly suggest it. In the film, DuPont launched an internal investigation about the Teflon coatings it was using on household products after side effects were noticed in the worker population. It then decided, knowing that these side effect happened, to dump the chemical runoff into the local water ways.
This is a perfect example of prioritizing making money now, over the future of thousands or more people, animals and environments. This is not the only movie about big business making bad decisions. The 2000 critically acclaimed movie Erin Brockovich is another example of a business knowing it was dumping chemicals that were harmful to everything it encounters into the local area. Just these two simple examples should be enough to answer the question above. Yes, businesses should be responsible for keeping track and managing the social, economic and environmental impacts of their actions.
What value does using the TBL bring to a business, and is it worth the potential drawbacks of incorporating it?
The potential values of using the TBL is that the business is sustainable in all three areas, social, economic, and environmental. If you can make a business that hits these three objects, then why wouldn’t people use it? The challenge from the reason is as a business scales up, it becomes harder to achieve all sustainability in all three categories. The want to achieve sustainability in all three categories drives innovation and innovation drives business and the economy forward such as the evolution of the personal computer. However, one drawback that was not mentioned is knowing when innovations are bound to cause more harm than good. The chemicals mentioned in the above answer to the first question are prime examples. They were innovations that helped make life easier for thousands, even millions, however the negative externalities that each had on the three categories makes them innovations that should not have been handled poorly.
What value do businesses using the TBL bring to society, and how might society be impacted if TBL were not a common business practice?
The value that TBL brings to society are many. Healthier mental state for workers, healthier lives for people close to the businesses and a healthier world in general. If TBL was not a common business practice, then something similar would be. People are known to be short sighted, however issues like global warming, mass extinction of species and other issues would be brought forth in society because not everyone is short sighted. The people that care about certain places, people, animals and more would voice the issues they see and eventually people as a whole would see the issue. If TBL was not a common business practice someone else would have coined a different phrase for it but the message would be somewhat the same, unsustainable resource use has, can, and will happen. What will the next generation do when they can’t live on the plant? TBL is a great idea and philosophy, if business continued as usual without adopting it, many innovations to reduce waste, such as the example of the carpet manufacturer in our reading this week, would not have happened. Who knows what else would not have been invented if TBL was not used in business.
