A Little Friday Luv for some Corporate Giants by Gia Machlin, February 04 2010, 1 Comment
HAPPY FRIDAY! I love Fridays. I remember the euphoric feeling I would get on Fridays when I was in high school. Maybe I was going away for the weekend on one of my youth group's "conventions" and I was giddy with anticipation of the fun and flirting and camaraderie ahead. Or maybe I was just elated to know that I didn't have to get up at the crack of butt for school the next day. Whatever the reason, Fridays made me happy. Now that I'm a middle aged mom and life can be a drag at times, I'm thrilled that Fridays still have that hint of excitement. Today I'm feeling generally excited about the direction of Sustainable Business. (OK, a little geeky, but true).
Over the past months, I've been very involved with a series sponsored by the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York's Sustainable Business Committee called "Making Green from Green." The presenters have been phenomenal and I sense a true commitment to sustainable practices from these industry leaders. Yes, I know, lately I have been skeptical, frustrated and generally down on big business and its ability to lead in this area. Why just a couple of blogs ago I was saying that the consumers need to be the ones to demand and drive change. And I do believe that. But I am also seeing a genuine effort by businesses to do the right thing.
I recently discovered this really cool company, CSRHUB, that ranks about 5,000 publicly traded companies on their environmental, employee, community and governance actions and performance. They have gathered data from 50 different sources of company Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) data and aggregated it for us all to use. In fact, one of their sources is the non-profit Climate Counts, one of EcoPlum's environmental causes. So I decided to go through and pick some companies that scored well, and see what you all thought.
| Company | Overall Score | Environmental Score | EcoPlum Gives a Thumbs Up for: |
| Hewlett Packard | 70 | 71 | The first major IT company to report GHG emissions associated with its supply chain |
| AstraZeneca | 67 | 67 | AstraZeneca Among Working Mother Magazine’s 2009 'Best Companies' |
| IBM | 66 | 67 | Provides Employees With 100% Primary Health Care Coverage, |
| Nokia | 64 | 61 | Named the world’s most sustainable technology company, by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes for 2009-10. |
| L'Oreal | 62 | 64 | In 2009, L’Oréal’s plants in Clark, Franklin and Piscataway, NJ and North Little Rock, AK sent zero waste to landfill. |
| HSBC | 59 | 57 | n 2005 HSBC became the world's first major bank to become 'carbon neutral'. |
| Nike | 57 | 62 | Very cool shoe recycling program: Reuse-a-shoe |
| UPS | 56 | 58 | Recently announced it has deployed 245 new delivery trucks powered by Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) to cities in Colorado and California. |
Do you agree? Disagree? Have you had experiences with these companies that you would like to share?
Have a great weekend. I know I will be tickled pink when the alarm clock doesn't go off at 6:30 am tomorrow.
Comments
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Gia Machlin on January 28 2016 at 04:36PM
Original comments from old site:
Gia
Submitted on 2010/03/02 at 3:29 pm | In reply to Amy Hebard.
Thanks Amy for your comments!! I would love to share some of your research on this blog! Please feel free to contact me at gia@ecoplum.com. On a related note, I have organized an event for the Columbia Business School Alumni Club’s Sustainable Business Committee called: Making Green from Green: Corporate Environmental Sustainability Programs. It will feature CSR pioneers like Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation. If you are in NYC on March 18th, please stop by! Here’s the info: http://www.cbsacny.org/article.html?aid=824
Have a great day!
Amy Hebard
earthsense.com
Submitted on 2010/02/07 at 2:41 pm
Gia, thanks for mentioning CSRHUB – haven’t checked it out, but I will now. I agree with you that there is a lot of good work going on by a number of major companies, and data from Climate Counts and Trucost (source of the Newsweek green rating data) are evidence of that. The challenge for them, I believe, is that most have done a poor job of communicating that progress. In the research we do at Earthsense, we find that barely one in three consumers can even name a green company, and only one in five says companies are doing enough. This is a big hurdle for companies to climb over! I’d be happy to share some of our research with you for your blog, if you’d like — just let me know.