BT and Sky Enter the Top 10 Most Green Companies in the World

A new study, which examined the environmental performance (i.e. corporate sustainability and environmental impact) of the world’s largest publicly-traded companies by market capitalisation, has ranked BT Group as the 3rd best in the world and Sky PLC (Sky Broadband) 8th from a total of 500 companies.

The Newsweek study was based on research from Corporate Knights and HIP (Human Impact + Profit) Investor Inc., including some unspecified input from “leading sustainability minds from non-governmental organizations and the academic and accounting communities.”

Apparently the companies were all scored based on their performance against eight specific indicators, such as Energy Productivity, Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Productivity, Water Productivity, Waste Productivity and the amount of green revenue (i.e. environmental and social impacts during production, consumption and post-usage lifecycle of related products and services) etc.

The top most green company in the world came out as Shire PLC, which is a Jersey-registered and Irish-headquartered global biopharmaceutical company. Shire PLC secured a green score of 87.70%, while BT Group scored 83.20% and Sky PLC 80.70%. Overall four UK companies made the top ten.

By comparison Vodafone came in at 40th position on a score of 71.80% and Liberty Global PLC (aka – Virgin Media) were found all the way down the table at no. 131 with a score of 58.50%. But past those there were no other UK telecoms firms in the top 500 table.

Fiona Ball, Sky’s Head of Responsible Business, said:

“This is an exciting year for us at Sky, as we celebrate 10 years of being carbon neutral and continue to make great progress against one of our key targets to halve our gross emissions relative to revenue by 2020, against a 2008 baseline. We’ve also recently signed up to RE100 and We Mean Business, and as part of the commitments we’ll be working to go 100% renewable, right across our business, something we have achieved in the UK and Ireland for many years.”

It’s nice to know that some companies in the telecoms and media sector are putting more consideration into their environmental impact than others, especially since the science appears to suggest that we could all be facing a much more challenging future. However it will take more than this to encourage other businesses to improve.