Importance Due to the existing crisis in the ecological environment in the territory of the Russian Federation, the creation of an estimation technique of economic systems' sustainability at different levels of the economy, including the enterprise level, assumes relevance in modern management science. Objectives The purpose of the article is to review the current estimation technique of the sustainability of an enterprise as a three-pronged ecological and socio-economic system, as well as the rationale of the approaches to the development of the authors' technique of the sustainability, which meets the criteria of the universality, simplicity and which are ecologically- and socially-oriented. Methods We have performed an analysis of the existing techniques for the purpose to determine the availability among them of all the three components of sustainability: economic, social and environmental ones. We have studied the possibility of their practical application for the efficient managerial decision making. We attempted to justify the appropriateness of the use of a hierarchical approach to select the sustainability assessment criteria. When analyzing the sustainability of an enterprise, it is important to proceed from the fact that in the modern conditions of the emerging ecological and socio-economic systems of different levels, the environmental factor is the determining condition of the sustainable development of the economic systems, because historically the concept of sustainable development is associated specifically with the environment. Results We came to a conclusion that the current techniques for the sustainability of an enterprise are characterized by the heterogeneity and labor-intensive data collection and processing of the parameters. Despite the complexity, the existing techniques use the economic component as a priority one, and first of all profit-making prevails. We point out that the insufficient attention is given to the characterization of an environmental sustainability. Conclusions and Relevance To assess the environmental sustainability, we propose to use three groups of indicators: the indexes, characterizing the environment pollution (emissions of air pollutants from the stationary sources, the volumes of wastewater discharge to water objects, the creation of waste products and consumption); the indicators of resources consumption (energy consumption, total water consumption, the area of occupied land) and, ultimately, the parameters characterizing the environment preservation behavior, which include the capture and recycling of air pollutants from the stationary sources, the use and waste treatment of production and consumption, as well as providing the allocations for the land reclamation.
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