The B Corp era

Matthieu Meneghini, Scientific Director of Green Media Lab and CEO of Koalisation, introduces us to the certification that guarantees a company's best practices


“Certified B Corp”. It is increasingly common to find this wording on the packaging or brochure of a product or on a company's website. But what does it mean? What is it and how does a company become a B Corp? And, first and foremost, where did this “necessity” come from? One could say that the answer is right before our eyes. The state of the general ecosystem and the impacts that its negative changes are having on human society are all too well known: climate change, loss of biodiversity and hyper-pollution are just some of the consequences of indiscriminate environmental exploitation, which in recent decades has seen extreme weather events increase by 300% and the average temperature rise by 1.2° C, to the point of causing levels of desertification and water scarcity in various parts of the globe. This has led to what experts have called a new geological era called the “Anthropocene” and a direct socio-economic impact. Today more than ever, assessing specific measures to prevent damage and protect the environment (environmental), to promote and protect human rights and communities (social) and to ensure compliance with corporate principles (governance) has therefore become a requirement. The starting points for anyone wishing to obtain this certification are obviously the 17 goals and 169 targets set by the United Nations for the so-called 2030 Agenda, a perfect tool for “direct responsibility”, a sort of self-declaration that does not require external verification. The next step is then to actually acquire B Corporation certification, issued by a third party after a thorough audit of a company’s entire internal system. The last and most significant step is the establishment of a Benefit Society, which represents the legal structure of the company itself: a Benefit Society is a traditional company with modified obligations committing it to higher standards of purpose, responsibility and transparency and whose corporate statute explicitly states, among other things, its commitment to pursuing the good of all stakeholders before profit. Other terms that are part of this new world are B Impact, or rather, an assessment of the company's performance in all dimensions of sustainability, starting with the measurement and analysis of the company's positive impacts in each of the five categories, and Life Cycle Assessment, an analytical assessment tool used to quantify the environmental footprint of a product or service over its entire life cycle. The purpose of this analysis is to have an overview of the environmental impacts generated during the life cycle of a product or service in order to proceed to their reduction and compensation.

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