Are Your Clients on the Newsweek Green List?

The annual Newsweek Green Rankings are often met with controversy in the sustainability community. But whether you love them or hate them, they are nonetheless a measure of the shifting sustainability of today's corporate giants. For the 2012 Green Rankings, Newsweek partnered with the environmental research organizations Trucost and Sustainalytics to analyze the top 500 US and Global companies by revenue, using a methodology based environmental impact, environmental management, and disclosure. For as much as it leaves out (supply chain) or ignores (anti-regulation lobbying efforts,) the analysis is able to boil down a company's sustainability to a single score.

Many big players show up at the top of the list, such as, IBM, HP, Dell, Nike. Obviously, some of these companies have inherently environmentally unfriendly practices- like producing e-waste. For this reason, the rankings are better viewed as a relative measure of a firm's sustainability from year to year, or against other firms. 

Of course the major issue in quantifying sustainability is who owns the pollution. As manufacturing is outsourced so is its pollution leaving the US with cleaner air and water. But would Apple perform as well if it had to 'own' all of the pollution associated with its product line. Newsweek elaborates:

The Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, along with other suppliers, manufactures Apple’s iPhone 5, which has sold millions of copies since its release this fall. The manufacturing of the iPhone produces pollution; who is responsible for that pollution? Is Foxconn responsible, since the emissions and waste derives from their plants? Or is Apple responsible, since it depends on the services of Foxconn? Both have some responsibility. Without Foxconn or the other suppliers, Apple would not have the iPhone to sell. Some responsibility also sits with the financial institutions that benefit from the shares of Apple stock they own. As the old saying goes, you are what you eat, or in this case, what you profit from...

According to Trucost's analysis for the UN, 49% of the environmental impacts of the top 3000 firms come from hidden impacts within the supply chain. This year 20% of the firms in the Newsweek list volunteered some supply chain information, even if incomplete. 

Find the full Newsweek rankings at thedailybeast.com

Read more about supply chain sustainability at thedailybeast.com

Download Trucost's UNEP report on environmental externalities