Nevertheless, some experts don't think GRI goes far enough. Mark McElroy, a one-time management consultant with KPMG and what was then Price Waterhouse, and currently executive director of the non-profit Center for Sustainable Innovation in West Windsor, Vermont, says that while GRI measures behavior, it fails to calculate supply constraints.

More specifically, McElroy describes sustainability as a quotient, in which the numerator represents the behavior affecting the sustainability (reducing air emissions or water consumption, for example) and the denominator represents the amount of natural resources involved (clean air and water). If a metric only focuses on the numerator, as GRI does, the measure of sustainability is skewed, according to McElroy.

For instance, GRI guidelines suggest that companies report water consumption per year (a numerator). But unless water consumption is compared to how much water is available (the denominator), argues McElroy, the metric does not measure how long the supply will last. As a result, the company could register an improvement in water use year over year, yet be operating at an unsustainable rate if consumption outpaces the available water supply.

McElroy uses another set of metrics — dubbed the environmental and social footprints — to measure sustainability. His idea is to include the denominator in all calculations so improvement or failure of a goal can be measured within the proper context.

Although he's not familiar with emergy, McElroy acknowledges that corporations do need an alternative to GRI. That alternative should offer a common measurement unit for environmental and social issues and takes stock of fluctuations in the supply of natural resources.

For his part, Odum was apparently on the right track by commercially launching his metric in the power-generation business. According to Pearl Street's Makansi, executives in the power generation industry are always looking for ways to increase the value of plant assets "by adding positives and subtracting negatives."

To that end, Makansi developed his own proprietary methodology called E-Equity to measure the value of a power plant asset while assessing its impact on the environment, national security, community development, and other external factors. Familiar with the emergy metric, he points out that it's more robust than his tool in terms of measuring environmental effects.

Although Makansi believes that emergy analysis is still more academic than commercial, he expects business leaders to eventually develop the methodology, or one like it, into an environmental accounting standard. "There is no standard to simultaneously measure the economic, social, and environmental impact of technologies or corporations, but emergy is a starting point."

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