What does it really mean to be a strongly sustainable company? – A response to Nikolaou and Tsalis

In a recent issue of this journal Nikolaou and Tsalis (2018) published a paper titled “A framework to evaluate eco- and social-labels for designing a sustainability consumption label to measure strong sustainability impact of firms/products”. In their paper, the authors (N&T) develop a method for identifying strongly sustainable companies as a basis for consumer communication. N&T test their method on a case study of five chemical companies and conclude that two of these are strongly sustainable, essentially because they had obtained a higher number of eco-labels than the average across the five companies. While we agree with N&T on the relevance of applying a strong sustainability perspective in the assessment of companies, we are afraid that their method can lead to misguided consumer communication. At the root of this concern is that N&T 1) use a market average as reference to decide whether a company has a strong or weak sustainability performance and 2) use the number of eco-labels as an environmental indicator. We lay the foundation of this response by briefly accounting for the academic origin of the weak/strong sustainability dichotomy. We then present our argument against the method presented by N&T. This is followed by a proposal for how to improve the method. Finally, we discuss state of the art in strong sustainability assessments of companies, taking into account other existing methods that draw on the planetary boundaries concept and life cycle assessment.