The group project was an interesting and exciting exercise. We were given an opportunity to develop a framework for a sustainability rating tool of our choice. Our group decided to develop a rating tool framework for chain of multinational fast food restaurants. The reason is simple: it has a wide network all around the world. If the parent company decided to apply sustainability practise to all of its franchises, the impact would be very significant considering the scale of the fast food restaurant network.

It is interesting to apply sustainability framework in the business area with products that do not really promote one of the most important aspect of sustainability and human life: health. After the presentation, Jeff Oatman as the reviewer asked us this very question. We came across this discussion prior to deciding our topic. And we decided to move forward under one simple argument, it is better to do something rather than doing nothing. Less bad is better than doing nothing. The case study is a huge industry with huge impacts. A positive intervention to way the business operate would at least move it to a better level in terms of sustainability,

Another important reason for us to proceed with this topic is that so far, a holistic sustainability practise of fast food restaurants chain is not applied internationally yet. Several fast food restaurants have already practised sustainability operation within a certain country. Or if applied globally, it doesn’t cover the overall aspects of sustainability. For example, Mc Donald has a global sustainability commitment but doesn’t have a holistic sustainability approach to achieve this commitment. Our framework for this rating tool is envisioned to provide a comprehensive break down on how a fast food restaurants network can practise sustainability strategies globally.

Another aspect that was questioned is related to our decision to include “beauty” as one of the criteria of this rating tool. It is a very subjective quality. How can you judge the aesthetic of a building? It is a difficult question to answer because there is no specific answer to that question. However, our logic is not to define what beauty is. Our main argument to include “beauty” as one of the criteria is because a building which is socially accepted as a beautiful design will encourage the users and occupants to take care and maintain this building in a much longer period. The parameter for this “socially-accepted” beauty can be varied across the world, depending on the social and cultural context of the area. There are still a lot of rooms of discussion though in this area.

What I learned from this exercise is all about team work and understanding different views on sustainability from other group members. The discussions themselves are very important learning exercise. From the class presentation itself, I learned a lot from other groups on different approaches and criteria for sustainability within different contexts of rating tool application. Generally, the qualities envisioned to achieve are pretty much the same, the tools are slightly different. Priority on parameters is also different among different groups. It is shown by different weighting done by different group on the same parameter.

The full document of our group’s rating tool framework can be downloaded here.