The Sustainability Assessment Model (SAM): Measuring Sustainable Development Performance

Introduction Increasingly, legislative requirements are being placed on councils and businesses to incorporate sustainability into their activities. However, it is inherently difficult to assess the sustainability of activities and there are few tools to do this. It is therefore difficult to understand if an individual project contributes to broad sustainability objectives or if it incorporates understanding of sustainability into organisations’ activities. The Sustainability Assessment Model (SAM) is a tool for engaging people within organisations in sustainable development thinking and to evaluate the sustainability of projects (Baxter et al. 2002; Bebbington and Frame 2003). This article provides an overview of the SAM and presents a preliminary assessment of how it was used to assess organic waste processing options for a local council in New Zealand. the total costs (and benefits) of an activity over some defined boundary. The primary benefit of FCA is, therefore, the information that it generates which has been previously unavailable to decision-makers.