Powered by © 2025 DjaoDjin. All rights reserved. Legal.

About The Sustainability Project (TSP)

Mission

TSP’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of sustainability best practices across industry sectors by making them easy to access, understand and adopt.

There are numerous practices that eliminate or minimize the impact of our activities on air, land, water and ecosystem resources, and that help to ensure that business is conducted in a more socially responsible manner. Barriers to adoption often include lack of awareness or access to this information, perceived complexity or expense, and/or no incentive to do better. TSP’s mission is to remove these barriers by providing universal access to information and tools that make it easy to identify, understand, prioritize and implement best practices.

From sharing knowledge, to measuring impact, to setting targets

Over the years, a body of knowledge accumulates through informal conversations, conferences, presentations of trial-and-learn experiments, etc.

This raw knowledge can be found under the Knowledge Sharing section on TSP.

Industry Practices

Through experience industry best practices emerge. A practice must fulfill the following criteria.

  • There must be a body of knowledge to support the practice.
  • The practice's intrinsic Environmental value, Ops/maintenance value, Financial value, and implementation ease can be assessed qualitatively.
  • The practice's impact in terms of Energy & Green House Gas (GHG) Emissions, Water or Waste can be measured, or can lead to more accurate measurements.
  • The value of the practice to one or more industry segments can be demonstrated.

There are currently 400+ environmental sustainability best practices covering 24 industries segments on TSP. They form the basis of a rigorous sustainability assessment of an organization, and can be used to:

  • Assess your maturity relative to best practices.
  • Benchmark with industry peers.
  • Select high value improvement actions.
  • Support sustainability or non-financial reporting.
How does best practice content get created and vetted?

Anyone can commission or initiate the development of content for an industry segment that is not yet represented on TSP. We partner with industry stakeholders and with subject matter experts in best practice focus areas to develop new content. Prior to being made publicly available, content is reviewed and vetted using TSP’s Content Governance Process.

Is content always made freely accessible for anyone to browse?

TSP encourages that all content hosted on the website be made universally available for anyone to access under a Creative Commons license; however, content can be commissioned or uploaded and hosted behind a firewall for exclusive access by a specified set of users.

Contributors/Sponsors

From the start of project, collaboration has been fundamental to ensuring that TSP is optimized to meet end-user objectives and needs. Subject matter experts from multiple organizations volunteered their time and expertise to help test and fine-tune the initial version of the platform. Corporations and organizations that provided information, time and/or funding for the development of the content of this website so far include:

  • ABB
  • Altec
  • ARB
  • AR Consulting
  • Base Energy Company
  • California Green Business Program
  • Center for Environmental Health
  • Deloitte
  • Eaton
  • Environmental Resources Management
  • EPA, SmartWay
  • Sustainable Supply Chain Alliance (SSCA)
  • Garcia & Associates
  • General Electric
  • Golder Associates
  • Green Consultants
  • Okonite
  • Pacific Gas and Electric Company
  • Quanta
  • Siemens
  • Southwire
  • Syblon Reid
  • The Green Electronics Council
  • The Nielson Group
  • Turner Construction
  • UPS
  • And many passionate individuals

TSP’s story

Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), first major sponsor.

As part of supply chain excellence, PG&E sought to accelerate suppliers’ ability to adopt high value sustainability practices.

PG&E also sought a way to obtain meaningful measures of benchmarked supplier maturity against best practices to use in supplier scorecards and RFPs, and identify areas to target for programmatic improvement.

Open source, a founding principle.

A key objective of the initiative was to create a public good; a resource for anyone to access and benefit from.

DjaoDjin, Inc. was therefore an ideal development partner and host platform for TSP, because of its policy of creating all its code under an "open source" or General Public License (GPL). This means that the source code is freely available to anyone to duplicate, run, study, share and modify with the provision that any resulting modifications or additions are also made freely available under the original GPL license to benefit the greater good, rather being exploited for private benefit or profit. Similarly, content on the website is made freely available for anyone to access under a Creative Commons license.

Collaboration, core to development.

From the start of project, collaboration has been fundamental to ensuring that TSP is optimized to meet end-user objectives and needs.

Multiple subject matter experts from multiple organizations volunteered their time and expertise to help test and fine-tune the initial version of the platform (see initial list of collaborating organizations).

Adopted by SSCA, an alliance of energy utilities.

In 2018, TSP was adopted by the Sustainable Supply Chain Alliance (SSCA), an alliance of utilities in North America and their suppliers, to support their mission of helping to advance sustainability in their organizations. SSCA members use the platform to assess and benchmark top suppliers relative to industry segment-specific best practices and to help them advance in sustainability using the improvement planning tools. The organization also uses TSP as a knowledge management and benchmarking tool to help utilities advance sustainable best practices in the procurement of services, products and equipment they purchase.

2,000+ suppliers completed an sustainability practices assessment

From Small Businesses to Fortune 500s, accross industries spanning Construction to Metal Frabrication, more than 2,000 suppliers completed an sustainability practices assessment on TSP by the end of 2024. Find if your company did »

Parnership with Insite

In 2024, TSP officially partnered with Insite Compliance to provide desktop verification of responses to the sustainability practices questionnaire This partnership enables supplier risk assessment teams to report and make decisions with an increased level of confidence.

Ads program

In 2025, TSP opened an Ads program for companies providing environmental sustainability solutions to advertise on TSP. Become an Ad partner.

Contact us