Commercial, Energy Efficiency, Industrial - February 5, 2018
100 most sustainable companies named
Cisco Sytems topped the list of 100 most sustainable companies released by Barron’s on Feb 3. Salesforce.com ranked second, followed by Best Buy, Intuit, and HP rounding out the top five. Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Oshkosh, Clorox, and Xylem completed the top ten.
This is Barron's first ranking of the most sustainable companies in the U.S. The company explained, "The term 'sustainability' doesn’t have a single definition, but for years now, European investors have looked at environmental, social, and governance factors—qualitative measures that people believe promote a company’s long-term health and growth prospects. Thus, what began as an expression of values is finding wider currency as good corporate practices. That view has made its way to the U.S." Barron’s noted that more U.S. investors are signing the United Nations guidelines that commit to incorporating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Criteria.
Top-ranked Cisco Systems made some of the biggest strides towards sustainability in 2017, reducing its Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse-gas emissions by 41% since 2007 and meet its goal of getting 80% of its electricity from renewable sources. Cisco's future goals include cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 60% from 2007 levels by 2022 and using renewable energy for 85% of its electricity.
Barrons worked with Calvert Research and Management to create these rankings. Calvert considered the 1,000 largest publicly held U.S. companies as of Dec. 31 and applied 300 performance indicators across five key categories: shareholders, employees, customers, community, and planet.
Also reported was the fact that these top 100 companies "had remarkable share-price performance as a whole for 2017—returning 29%, compared with 22% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index."
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