Newsweek’s Corporate Environmental Rankings
Newsweek announced it’s 2009 green rankings list comprised of environmental rankings for 500 of America’s largest corporations. Newsweek worked ith several major research firms who gather environmental data to assess each company. The goal of this effort was to determine the environmental impact that the largest corporations in America have.
The rankings are based on three parts:
- Environmental Impact Score: The major components of this score are greenhouse gas emissions, how much water they use, waste disposal and chemical emissions which is based off of companies reported data.
- Green Policies Score: This score is based off of the companies environmental policies and how successful those policies are.
- Reputation Score: Comprised from the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which all companies involved participated in.
It’s interesting to see where many of the companies we often associate with are rated. The top 3 include HP, Dell and Johnson and Johnson, while many utility companies and a few food companies including Conagra, Smuckers and Tyson foods.
There may be some debate over the actual score values as many of them are by no means an exact measures. The environmental impact score is based off of data given by each company as well as formulated data from publicly available data. Both the policies and reputation ratings can be subjective and difficult to actually measure.
Regardless of how accurate these scores are, it’s good to see Newsweek put together this ranking to get people aware of the environmental impact these major companies have. I thing that really stuck out to me in the rankings was the fact that there were so many energy companies at the bottom of that list. It makes sense, but it just shows that we must put more pressure on not just the energy companies, but all these major companies that use so much energy to begin using more renewable sources.
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