SASB Issues Provisional Sustainability Accounting Standards for Consumption Industries

The SASB (Sustainability Accounting Standards Board) has released “provisional standards” to cover 7 industries including meat, dairy and poultry, alcoholic beverages, non-alcoholic beverages, personal and household products, tobacco and agricultural products.

Sustainability Accounting Standards Board is a NPO and is involved in providing public listed companies in United States of America with sustainability accounting standards. The standards issued by the SASB target to support companies disclose and manage the related sustainability matters that are expected to impact materially on them.

Some of the examples relating to the disclosure matters include SCM (Supply Chain Management), marketing and labeling integrity and food safety. On average standards cover 6 areas per industry and seventy one percent of them are quantitative.

Dr. Jean Rogers, CEO of SASB, in a recent statement said that consumption industries create several essential necessities and as a result there is an in-built tension among the usage of resources in their operations and the requirement to manufacture household products, beverages and food for an increasing population. He further said that these standards assist companies within consumption industries to manage issues such as packaging, scarcity and climate effects including commodity prices and crop yield.

Consumption sector has been divided by the SASB in two sub parts as it contains a great No. of industries in it. The parts are as follows:

1. Consumption I – Staple manufacturing industries

2. Consumption II - Retailing and Consumer goods

Standards relating to Consumption II are expected to be issued by the end of September 2015.

Hershey’s senior director for CSR, Todd Camp said that efforts by SASB to propagate, develop and define sustainability accounting standards is an important step in facilitating companies to disclose decision-useful and material information to stakeholders. The process is very precise and is based on research and equal participation of stakeholders, and is important in supporting an understanding of the linkage between business performance and strategy and non-financial metrics.

For at least a year, these standards will remain provisional and feedback is more than welcome.