Global 100 green companies announced during Davos

The top-ranked company in the Global 100 list of the world’s most sustainable corporations is Umicore, a Belgium-based materials technology and recycling company. The rest of the top five announced recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were Natura Cosmeticos, Statoil, Neste Oil and Novo Nordisk. Hailed recently as the world’s most credible corporate sustainability ranking, the Global 100 is compiled by Toronto-based media and investment research company Corporate Knights, and consists of the 100 top-performing stocks worldwide on a range of sector-specific ‘sustainability’ metrics.

With collective revenue of about $3.1 trillion (roughly 4.5 per cent of global GDP) and a workforce of nearly 5.3 million, the Global 100 companies – represent 22 countries on six continents. Canada and the United States led the way in country representation, each with 10 constituents, followed by Australia, Britain and France, each with nine constituents.

Pharmaceuticals company Biogen Idec and technology giants Intel and Cisco were three of the US-firms listed in the top twenty; Centrica, Sage and Prudential were part of the UK contingent; and Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson were amongst those representing France and Sweden.

Umicore, which derives the majority of its revenue from clean technologies such as catalysts that reduce pollution from vehicles powered by internal combustion engines achieved the top overall ranking in the 2013 Global 100 due to its strong, across-the-board sustainability performance. The company notched top-quartile performance on six of the 12 indicators used in the project, including carbon and water productivity, and employee turnover.

Commenting on this year’s Global 100, Toby Heaps, Corporate Knights CEO, remarked, “The Global 100 are leading a resource productivity revolution, transforming waste into treasure and doing more with less. They are steering our civilization away from ecological overshoot and back to a place of balance with our planet.”

He added, “on carbon, water, energy, and waste, the Global 100 are on track to double their resource productivity by 2025 in two-thirds of the cases, and in an era of peak commodity prices, this makes as many dollars as it does sense.”