MyBakery
You are the owner of MyBakery. MyBakery is a fairly small family business, keen to do the right thing by the community and the environment, whilst being able to make good profits to stay in business. You provide jobs for a number of people in the local community and sell mostly to local customers in the shop but also to one or two commercial outlets. You support local events at a special price.

The city council is conducting a search for community-spirited and enviro-friendly businesses for inclusion in their good-neighbour-&-green shopping guide. You feel that you should be able to qualify and decide to do a TBL report in order to discover where your major impacts are.

You choose a set of indicators that you hope will reflect the impacts that you're interested in. First of all, your community is important to you, and therefore you choose ‘Family income’ and ‘Employment’.

You know that in general, food business use a lot of water for cleaning machines and workplaces. You wonder how you fare in comparison to other bakeries; you choose the indicator ‘Water use’. Then, every day you watch the truck driver deliver those bags of flour and wheat into your kitchen, and marvel at the vast quantities you must have gone through in a whole year. Therefore you pick the indicator ‘Material flow’.

When you bought your ovens a few years ago you bought the best, most efficient ones, that you could afford, however you realise that they use a lot of electricity. You hope that the indicators ‘Energy consumption’ and ‘Greenhouse gas emissions’ will tell you more. Being in constant contact with wheat growers and beef farmers, you know that they are responsible for huge tracts of land. You want to know how much land is disturbed by the wheat and meat you put in your pies. You choose the indicators ‘Land disturbance’ and Ecological Footprint – disturbance’. Finally, you’re interested in your own business’s financial health, and choose ‘Gross operating surplus’ and ‘Exports’ in order to compare yourself with your competitors.

From the information you gather through the TBL reporting process you hope to be able to substantiate your claims for inclusion in the good-neighbour-&-green shopping guide. You hope also that it will reveal some areas where you can improve your performance, without breaking the bank, so that you can continue to thrive as a business and at the same time uphold the family’s good name.