Triple Bottom Line Rodica Milena Zaharia and Razvan Zaharia Contents 1 TBL: The Naissance of a New Concept for an Old Concern ............................... 2 1.1 TBL Concept ........................................................................... 2 1.2 TBL Critics ............................................................................. 4 2 Codes of Conducts as a Tool for TBL Reports: From Issuing Codes of Conduct to Reporting the TBL Performance ............................................................. 7 2.1 Limited Resources for a Growing World .............................................. 9 2.2 The Environmentalist Movement in a Liberal Philosophy ............................ 13 2.3 Global World, Global Problems, and Lack of Global Solutions ...................... 15 3 TBL and the Business Model: The Need for a Stronger Cooperation Between Governments and Companies to Facilitate the Transition Toward Sustainable Development (see, also, section Economic Aspects) ........................................ 19 4 Future Directions: Quo Vadis, Triple Bottom Line? ......................................... 22 4.1 New Concepts, But New Content? ..................................................... 22 4.2 To a Changed System and a Changed Leadership ..................................... 22 4.3 To a New Sustainable Business Model ................................................ 23 4.4 The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Chance to Rebuild the World ............................ 23 5 Summary ...................................................................................... 24 References ........................................................................................ 24 Abstract The triple bottom line (TBL or 3BL) is one of the most used concepts when it comes to discuss about sustainability. It was coined by John Elkington in 1994 and from that moment it grabs the attention of all of those interested to provide analysis about sustainability, at macro- and microlevel, or for those concerned about the challenges towards the way the world is developing or is governing. This chapter provides a navigation on the literature that deals with the TBL, pointing out the context of the historic development of the concept and the relationship with the concept of sustainability with which is considered synonym. R. M. Zaharia (*) · R. Zaharia Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Crowther, S. Seifi (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22438-7_2-1 1