By Tim Wilson

The mass media love the power of lists to attract readers or viewers. Pick a topic from music to politics to sports to movies, put together a ranked list that starts with “Best…”, “Greatest…” or “Top…” and it becomes a must read or must watch if you don’t want to be left out of the water cooler debate.

There is now confirmation that the green movement in business has risen to the level of a hot topic, at least around corporate water coolers, as Newsweek magazine has come out this week with its ranking of the Top 500 Greenest Big Companies in America.

Newsweek explains that as the political will to curb carbon missions rises to meet scientific consensus on the threat of climate change, “the economic case for going green is becoming more compelling.” The world’s political powers are meeting in Copenhagen in December to hammer out an agreement on climate change and the Obama administration has its sights set on a cap-and-trade system on emissions. Considering this confluence of political, economic and environmental climates, Newsweek reports, “Smart companies are working to better understand – and cut – those emissions ahead of new regulations.”

The magazine worked for more than a year with leading environmental researchers KLD Research & Analytics, Trucost and CorporateRegister.com to rank the 500 largest U.S. companies based on their actual environmental performance, policies and reputation. KLD’s Green Policy Score, based on its analysis of corporate environmental policies, programs and initiatives, as well as negative environmental events, provided 45 percent of each company’s overall score in the Newsweek rankings. Trucost contributed another 45 percent of the overall score with its Environmental Impact Score in the rankings, capturing the total cost of more than 700 environmental impacts of a corporation’s global operations. Corporate Register.com provided the Reputation Score for the rankings, which counted for the final 10 percent of scores.

Newsweek acknowledges creating the rankings system was a challenge due to the “apples-and-oranges element” of comparing across a variety of industries. And the magazine notes that the lack of a uniform standard for reporting the relevant data presented another obstacle. But Newsweek and its research partners believe the effort produced rankings that make sense and the reporting itself has value. “One of the purposes of this is to improve the transparency of corporations…and encourage them to provide an even higher level of disclosure,” said Thomas Kuh, KLD’s managing director.

In the meantime, the rankings are what they are, which leads to the all important question of who’s king of the green hill? Leading a technology sector charge to the summit is Hewlett-Packard, followed by Dell, Johnson & Johnson, Intel and IBM. The next five companies are more diverse, as the top 10 rounds out with State Street, Nike, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Applied Materials and Starbucks. Check out the full list and rankings by sector at http://greenrankings.newsweek.com/top500.

Let the water cooler debates begin!

Tags: awards, environment, green, Newsweek, rankings
This entry was posted by Tim Wilson on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 5:28 pm, and is filed under Center News & Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.