Introduction

All of this is odd because the very word ‘standard’ suggests that there should be only one for any given topic. Standardisation for some topics (perhaps the dimensions of a screw thread) does tend to produce a single standard. Standards for sustainability are not like that. The section on the ‘Variety of standards’ describes what they are like. In this way, books on standards, like standards themselves, can make things worse as well as better. This book is simply trying to provide a map or some basic orientation to the world of standards. As a result it cannot claim to be definitive: there are many hundreds of sustainability

standards out there. Of course, they are of varying quality and some are little used.