Last year, Tamrah Brown did what scores of business people are doing these days. She started looking into sustainable business practices, with a goal of bringing some of those back to her employer: Eaton Peabody, the Bangor-based law firm that also has offices in Augusta, Brunswick and Ellsworth.

But Brown soon realized she’d need some outside help to keep up with the ever-evolving concept of “sustainability,” an idea that had even come to encompass whether her boss was earning enough money.

Brown, Eaton Peabody’s human resources manager, noticed that many law firms across the country, especially on the West Coast, were instituting sustainable business practices in their workplaces, such as reducing paper waste and conserving energy. She did her research, took those best practices and used them to create a new sustainability policy that Eaton Peabody adopted in March 2009. “It’s something we wanted to do, something we wanted to look at,” Brown says. “It seems like a good direction to move our business in.”

Eaton Peabody’s new policy includes the typical green initiatives: deploying recycling bins for previously un-recycled materials like batteries and cardboard, training employees to print double-sided to save paper, adding a signature to e-mails asking people to “consider the environment” before printing. The company even implemented an alternative transportation program that offers incentives to employees who bike or carpool to work. And it installed video conferencing equipment in its two largest offices to reduce the need for employees to commute back and forth.

So Brown was surprised when she discovered that Maine Businesses for Sustainability’s new sustainability assessment tool asked questions about whether the company has a wellness program (it doesn’t, but Brown says it’s in progress) and if it buys products from other sustainably minded vendors (the company is limited at this time, Brown says, but hopes to once other area businesses become more focused on sustainability).

Eaton Peabody was part of a pilot group, including six businesses, to use the new 100-question assessment tool, which was developed in coordination with Massachusetts-based Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. The assessment tool is ready to go, but the organization is planning an official launch in the fall, says Merritt Carey, a consultant for the organization who is spearheading the assessment tool program.

For Brown, the assessment was “an eye opener.” “I didn’t really think that those would be part of an assessment, or part of a sustainability-type initiative,” she says. “It took a little while to get my head around it, but I’m glad I looked at it and got a broader view of what I had before.”

Sustainability is more than starting recycling programs and encouraging employees to switch off their computers at night, according to Carey. Being sustainable involves employee benefits, community relations and even finances. (Question 6 asks: “Do you know what return, in the form of owner’s draw, the business must pay out to provide sufficient income to meet the business owner’s needs?” A corresponding guide notes: “To be a viable, fulfilling, and sustainable venture, a business must provide a reasonable livelihood for its owner.”)

“So many businesses focus on being green,” Carey says of MBS, formerly Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility. “All your green businesses don’t do any good if you don’t pay your employees a livable wage. All this stuff is interconnected.”

Sustainability means different things to different people, though most would say it has something to do with the environment, being green or reducing waste. “You ask 10 people on the street what sustainability means and they’ll all have a different answer,” Brown says. “But what we all need to focus on is what we do now affects the future. We need to stay focused on that and make sure that’s part of our decision-making process as businesses.”

A broader definition of sustainability

The idea that sustainability encompasses every decision a business makes, from wellness programs to employee benefits, is gaining traction, according to Paul Farrow, former CEO of Belfast’s Moss Inc. and now a consultant on sustainability practices for a large private equity firm.

Farrow, also a MBS board member, warns Maine companies to ignore the movement toward sustainability at their own risk. The conventional wisdom that sustainable business practices drive up costs and are embraced only by businesses that see it as “a cool thing” and have the money to spend is wrong, he says. It’s become a matter of remaining competitive.

Businesses embracing sustainable business practices are still the minority, Farrow says. But some of the most powerful businesses in the world are already moving in that direction, he says. “If anybody asks me, ‘What could Maine businesses do in a sustainability sense to be as powerful as they could be,’ I’d say, ‘Go study the supply-chain initiatives of big companies,’” he says. “Start with Wal-Mart.”

Last October, Wal-Mart completed the first phase of a new sustainability initiative. It had its top suppliers complete a 15-question survey on their sustainability efforts. The initiative has already yielded cost savings for Wal-Mart and its suppliers, Farrow says, and forced a shift toward sustainability among companies that want to continue supplying products to the world’s largest retailer. Small businesses in Maine may not have the power to force a sea change within the business world, but they certainly want to be able to operate in supply chains like that, Farrow says. “We better be conversant in those terms because our competitors will be,” he says. “Those who say they can’t afford it or it’s too complicated will be left behind.”

A sustainable company may also see a competitive advantage when it comes to recruiting talent, Carey says. At Eaton Peabody, Brown believes its sustainability initiatives — the alternative transportation program and focus on energy conservation — will give it an edge when it comes to hiring the next generation. “We find that each generation weighs those types of things more and more when considering where they want to work,” she says.

As companies adopt sustainable business practices, those fundamental values enter a company’s culture, Farrow says, leading it to gravitate toward suppliers and other businesses that share the same practices and attracting employees with similar values. “Once you start aligning values, employees there for the paycheck and not interested in fulfilling a bigger mission either get driven to improve because they start to believe in what the company is doing or they get driven out,” Farrow says. “It’s the real ticket to high-performance organizations.”

Holding businesses accountable

Keeping that competitive advantage is where benchmarking comes into play. Benchmarking — measuring a company’s policies or products against a standard or a recognized leader in the field — offers a company the ability to see where it is today, what direction it wants to go in and how to get from point A to point B, Carey says. “The word ‘sustainable’ is thrown around all the time,” she says. “You can’t go out as a company and claim to be sustainable without some ability to back it up.”

There’s no lack of green benchmarking opportunities out there. Benchmarking can validate a company’s green practices for consumers, whether you want to build a LEED-certified building, sell USDA-certified organic food or sell seafood certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council.

In Planet Dog’s case, benchmarking using the Maine Business for Sustainability tool allowed the company to assess whether it’s as sustainable as it believed it was. From its founding, the Portland pet supply company has been driven by a strong sustainable and philanthropic mission. But a company with such a strong ethos can sometimes lose sight of where it falls in the bigger picture. “You’re only as good as you look in the mirror,” says Patti Smith, Planet Dog’s director of domestic sales, operations and human resources. “We think we do nice things, but really, how do we stack up with other companies?”

The assessment tool validated much of what Planet Dog already does, but Smith’s “ah-ha” moment came when she was asked about Planet Dog’s three facilities in the Greater Portland area. The company leases the buildings, so has less control over several sustainable initiatives. As a result, the company has explored how best to work with landlords to initiate sustainability measures within facilities. They’ve put in motion-sensor lights and discussed in-house composting at the facility. Those are “low-hanging fruit,” Smith says. “But I really see another horizon: How to negotiate a lease and bring a sustainability element into the negotiation phase.”

The next step for Maine Businesses for Sustainability is to set up a Maine-specific resource guide so that if a company answers ‘no’ to an assessment question, an automatically-generated list of local resources will help that company progress.

When a company has a series of ‘no’ answers — each a potential new initiative or policy change — how does it figure out which to prioritize? Matt Haas, main operations manager at Idexx in Westbrook, says his employer has stuck with a “triple-bottom line” approach. “If it’s beneficial socially, environmentally and financially, it goes in the bucket,” he says.

A major challenge for any company pursuing these sorts of initiatives is having employees buy in to the efforts. Haas suggests approaching the issues from the ground up, rather than from the top down. “It’s education, it’s awareness and effective communication rather than mandates and policies,” he says.

But benchmarking goes beyond answering a questionnaire, just like pursuing sustainability goes beyond implementing new recycling and energy-efficiency policies. “[Benchmarking] is measuring a snapshot in time and gives ideas on where you need to focus. Where we’ve answered ‘no’ we can look at that and say how do we make that a ‘yes’,” Eaton Peabody’s Brown says. “This is an ongoing thing. It’s not like one day we hit all the goals and it’s good. It’s an evolving process.”

If sustainability is extended to encompass everything from employee benefits to community relations and is embraced by a majority of companies, then it ceases to be a catch word. As the conversation has come full circle, the business world is left discussing smart, common sense business practices.

That’s what Neil Cambridge, president of the North American division of Comparison International, a global benchmarking firm with offices in Portland, expects to happen. “Sustainability will be less of a buzzword and less of a unique thing that sits over there and more like standard operating procedure,” he says. “Much like the Internet, technology has become embraced and integrated into almost everything that we do. I think sustainability is going to follow the exact same route.”

But it still takes one company at a time to make a movement.

In Maine, companies like Eaton Peabody, Idexx and Planet Dog are hoping their efforts toward sustainability will encourage other businesses to do the same. “I hope that we would motivate other companies to take sustainability seriously and really incorporate that into their business plans as we have,” Brown says. “To me that’s the future. That’s where we’re going and we need to get on the wagon and get moving.”

Whit Richardson, a writer based in Yarmouth, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.