From Denmark to India: Top 100 Companies Leading the World in Clean Capitalism

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.

The @DesignObserver looks at the Evolving Narrative of Sustainability

We love this article by the Design Observer, which looks at the evolving narrative of sustainability over the years.

There is a technological progression towards efficiency, towards creating smaller or lesser polluting systems. But that's not necessarily the solution, and in fact can perhaps get in the way of every achieving true sustainability.

The article implores us to differentiate between technologically-driven sustainability, which is where a lot of what we're talking about lies, and instead also pay attention to the broader questions of ecological sustainability. To look at and develop new models for consumption itself, not just more efficient ways of producing and consuming as we always have, being cognizant that there is a broader ecological impact of iterations within the narrow field of "efficient products".

This is a conversation we hope to have on The Green Radar over the next few weeks, and would love for you to participate.

“Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.”E.F. Schumacher