Top 10 Green Companies in the World in 2014
Do you work for or deal with one of the top 10 green companies?
Popular magazine Newsweek recently published the names of the companies which have scored top marks in corporate sustainability and environmental impact.
Before I list the names, I need to tell you that this is a flawed list – mainly because many of the measurements are difficult. More details are below the list.
But here’s who ranks “greenest” out of all companies measured:
1 Vivendi Telecommunications Services
2 Allergan Health Care
3 Adobe Systems Information Technology
4 Kering Consumer Discretionary
5 NTT Docomo Telecommunication Services
6 Ecolab Materials
7 Atlas Copco Industrials
8 Biogen Idec Health Care
9 Compass Group Consumer Discretionary
10 Schneider Electric Industrials
If you want to see what these companies do / produce, go straight here. Else read on below for the problems associated with this survey.
How Was the Survey Done?
The survey was carried out on the 500 largest publicly-traded companies around the world (by market capitalization).
It attempted to measure each company’s share of
- greenhouse gases
- energy use
- water use
- waste
and it’s good news that many companies are estimating and disclosing this.
Why Are We Seeing These Measurements Now?
It’s partly regulatory – this type of reporting is required in some but not all countries.
But it’s also partly due to pressure from investor groups (hooray!).
And there’s good news on that front: it looks like greener investment is smarter investment!
For example, Corporate Knights Capital reports that an investment of $100 spread across US companies that performed better-than-average on greenhouse gas emissions, would have returned $220 over the past 5 years, versus $160 via the S&P 500.
Plus of course, investing into these green companies also led to 93% fewer emissions than an equal investment in the S&P 500.
Why is it so difficult to be accurate?
There are the problems with these numbers (which are freely admitted by the authors of the study)
- The survey doesn’t take products and their carbon footprint into account. So a company extracting petroleum will have a higher carbon footprint than a company producing pizzas for example.
- The supply chain is not considered. A large part of the environmental impact for food companies for example, comes from their supply chain (cutting down rainforest to raise cattle for meat).
- Context is not considered. For example, if a bottled water company takes huge quantities of water from a high rainfall area, it has less of an impact than if the water came from the desert.
What About Reliabilty?
Can we be sure of the accuracy of the numbers that the top 10 green companies gave us?
Well, 71 percent of Global 500 companies and about 35% of U.S. 500 companies have their environmental numbers reviewed by an environmental consultant or accounting firm.
What Next?
Even if the figures aren’t 100% accurate, the way I look at it is that they’re the best we’ve got.
I for one will be supporting the top 10 green companies by buying their products (if I need them) instead of their competitors – and I hope you do too! Go her to find out what each of these green companies does.
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