Societal issues are one of the three legs of the sustainability stool, along with economics and environment protection. It by far gets the least attention, which might explain the nearly empty room at the National Safety Congress and Expo this week for a session on EHS and sustainability.

Presenters talked proudly about sustainability best practices. They included a machine guarding code of conduct, a close calls program, a behavior-based safety program for office workers, and projects that reduced water consumption, lead battery disposal, and improved wood and metals recycling.

We admit we were confused. And we asked the presenters at the end of the session: Are all these societal sustainability projects?

Does a BBS program meet a social need?

Does a close call program?

Or machine guarding?

Answered one panelist: “The public expects companies to send home their employees each night as safe and healthy as when the employee left for work in the morning.”

We don’t think that really answered our question. By that logic, any safety and health activity that a company undertakes could be considered a social sustainability metric.

Sustainability currently suffers from a serious lack of consensus on exactly how to define corporate sustainability. At the NAEM conference in Tucson several weeks ago where sustainability was the central topic for 500 attending elite corporate EHS execs, it was joked that if you asked the 500 for a sustainability definition, you’ll get 500 different answers.

The Center for Safety and Health in Sustainability was set up this past June to provide new ideas for safety metrics beyond injury and fatality rates to be included in corporate sustainability reports. NAEM is also working on providing input on new metrics to the Global Reporting Initiative, whose reporting guidelines are most commonly used by companies. New guidelines with hopefully stronger safety and health metrics are to be released in 2013.

We hope companies don’t begin reporting their number of BBS programs or machine guarding programs as sustainability metrics. To do so says nothing about the quality of those programs, let alone answer the question of “Do they make for a better,  more sustainable society?”