To understand David Jones’ true negative environmental impacts, just follow the money

A sustainability teardown will begin with an evaluation of a company’s "business models" – the ways in which it makes money.

A single business may have many ways of making money. Generally, these will be related in some way, but each has managers who make decisions about how that of their own business units will be carried out to maximise their profit – and pay their own bonuses.

Consciously or otherwise, all companies’ managers make decisions that determine the magnitude and impact of their own organisation’s environmental footprint.

In David Jones’ case, its footprint is founded on its managers’ decisions to buy the goods sold to consumers in the company’s stores. The company also extends credit to customers and it makes money on the interest charged for such credit. Its managers try to lock customers into lasting relationships with the company.

There is scope for discomfort when making public the relationships between the actions and decisions of a company’s management team and that company’s impacts on climate and environment. These can also prove inconvenient in its relationships with the suppliers from which it buys and sells. (And you can follow this list to find the limitations of some of those brand suppliers’ undertakings on climate and environment.)

A teardown is structured to identify who is making a business’s buying and selling decisions, because each will play a different role in creating that company’s ultimate environmental footprint.

For maximum effect when depicting its environmental footprint, to discern where management places its priorities, it pays to identify, in this case about David Jones:

1. For what it earns its money
2. Where and on what it spends its money
3. The provenance of the goods and services it buys and from whom it buys them
4. Which companies are investing in it
5. Which organisations lend it money
6. Which organisations are its insurers
7. Where and how it invests in its efforts toward sustainability
8. How and for what its people are rewarded

Each of these factors plays a part in the investigation of David Jones that comprises its sustainability teardown.