Top Sustainable Companies in the World

Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based company, released its Global 100--a list of the most sustainable companies in the world. Leading in the top spot, is Westpac Banking, an Australian corporation. According to Forbes, Doug Morrow, Corporate Knight's Vice President, stated, "The hallmark of a sustainable enterprise is not just efficiency, but also mechanisms to encourage meritocracy, diversity, innovation and long-term planning. Management teams at sustainable corporations are afforded room to think and plan beyond the next financial quarter."

Corporate Knights released this list at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last month, encouraging other companies to compete with one another in terms of efficiency and sustainability. This competition will encourage companies to reduce their waste, increase their productivity, and make the world a little cleaner and greener. Several companies in America have also been leading by example, such as Google, Unilever, Sprint, and Starbucks.

Corporate Knights aggregated information of over 4,000 publicly traded companies and narrowed their list down to 350 based off of their financial performance, sustainability, and disclosure practices. The remaining 350 companies were evaluated and compared based on industry. According to Forbes, the companies were evaluated on "key environmental, social, and governance performance indicators, including waste productivity, CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio, leadership diversity, and employee turnover."

According to Forbes, Morrow reported that "[Westpac] was the first bank to join the Australian government’s Greenhouse Challenge Plus and the first financial institution in Australia to create a matching donation program. In the Global 100 methodology, it scored in the top quartile on all four resource productivity indicators (Energy, Carbon, Water and Waste Productivity), and on Leadership Diversity, which looks at gender diversity in management and on the board of directors. Westpac is Australia’s oldest banking institution, with annual revenues of $38 billion (USD) and over 36,000 employees."

Ranked second on Corporate Knight's list is Biogen Idec, an American biotechnology company specializing in pharmaceuticals and is the oldest biotechnology company in the world. The third top sustainable company is a Finnish minerals and metals processing company called Outotec OYJ. The company has focused on sustainability as a means to improve its performance and transparency.

Source: Forbes- "The World's Most Sustainable Companies of 2014"

To view the entire list or for more information about Corporate Knight's Global 100, view the Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2014/01/22/the-worlds-most-sustainable-companies-of-2014/

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