According
to Corporate Knights, media,
research and financial products company focused on quantifying and animating
clean capitalism drivers for decision makers, “In business, sustainability is when what is good for a company is also good
for the planet, and vice-versa”, says Toby Heaps, editor-in-chief.
In other words, we can say that sustainability is a
company’s power to align efforts towards balancing money, people and the
environment.
In this sense, Corporate Knights just announced 2012- List
of the 100 World’s Most Sustainable Companies. “For us at Corporate Knights,
sustainability is closely tied to what we call ‘clean capitalism,’ which we
define as an economic system in which prices fully incorporate social, economic
and ecological costs and benefits, and actors are clearly aware of the
consequences of their marketplace actions,” says Doug Morrow, vice president of
research at Corporate Knights.
The research group evaluated 400 companies using 11
environmental, social and governance performance measures, including energy
productivity, waste productivity, CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio and employee
turnover. Premise: to assume that companies were sharing reliable information,
be objective and if there is no data available then penalize the criteria.
