Over 70% of top companies on sustainable path

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND, January 27, 2010 – Corporate Knights, the magazine for clean capitalism, announced its sixth annual Global 100 list of the most sustainable large corporations in the world. This edition of the Global 100 list establishes a new standard of transparency for such rankings.

The 2010 Global 100 tapped intelligence from the world's largest sustainability research alliance put together by Legg Mason's Global Currents Investment Management to isolate the top ten per cent of companies from a universe of 3000 global stocks, which were then transparently ranked based on 10 indicators, with data sourced from ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business, and The BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL® service.

The Global 100 includes companies from 24 countries encompassing all sectors of the economy, with a collective enterprise value of $4 trillion, and three million employees.

The top rank overall went to General Electric Company, plyer of the multibillion dollar ecomagination line, whose score was bolstered by its industry leading ratio of sales to waste ($729,685 in sales per tonne of waste produced, good for 89th percentile of Capital Goods industry group), strong board gender diversity (almost a quarter of directors were female), and an impressive doubling of its carbon productivity (sales/tonnes of total CO2e) from 2006 to 2008, cutting total carbon emissions from 10.8 million tonnes to 6.5 million tonnes, while increasing sales from $150 billion to $181 billion. In addition to its carbon productivity improvements, GE also increased its annualized resource productivity in excess of the six per cent “sustainable path” threshold from 2006 to 2008 for waste, energy, and water, while paying 98% of its reported tax obligations over the same period.

Among the 24 countries, the United Kingdom led the way with 21 Global 100 companies (one more than they had in 2009). The United States followed with 12 (down from 20 in 2009). Canada and Australia tied for third with nine companies a piece (up from five, and four respectively). Rounding out the top ten scoring countries with the most constituents were Switzerland (six), France (five), Japan (five), Germany (four), while Brazil, Denmark, Finland and Sweden each registered three Global 100 constituents. Fifty per cent of the 2009 companies remained on the list in 2010.