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State of Green Business 2011
01 February 2011
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What's in the report?
The report draws from over 2,200 news reports, blog posts, opinion pieces, and podcasts published during 2010 on GreenBiz.com and its four channels - ClimateBiz, GreenerBuildings, GreenerComputing and GreenerDesign - and highlights 10 key trends and themes about the year ahead:
- Consumer Giants Awaken to Green
- Companies Aim for Zero
- The Developing World Yanks the Supply Chain
- Greener Transport Makes Its Move
- Sustainable Food Becomes a Main Course
- Metrics and Standards Become the Rule
- Toxics Concerns Spur Greener Alternatives
- Water Footprinting Makes a Splash
- Companies Learn to Close the Loop
- Bioplastics Become Material
Extract
Today, managing a company's environmental footprint is less and less limited to the environmental department. Increasingly, it is the domain of procurement, finance, facilities, fleets, legal, operations, real estate, supply chain, marketing, investor relations, even human resources. Growing numbers of us are recycling, telecommuting, rethinking business travel, turning off lights, rooting out waste, and generally being more conscious of the impacts of the things we do at work. In some companies, such activities are tied to managers' and executives' performance evaluations and compensation. Increasingly, these efforts are directed by someone in the C-suite.
Much of the greening of business remains an untold secret largely ignored by the mainstream media and, in many cases, not widely discussed even by companies. The former typically don't view corporate environmental leadership as news, or cynically believe company activities to be superficial marketing ploys. The latter fear that by pointing out what they're doing right, they may unwittingly attract an unwelcome spotlight on environmental challenges that remain unaddressed or unsolved. So they remain mum, lest they be accused of "greenwashing".
And so it goes. A great transformation is taking place. Will the public take notice? Will political leaders position themselves at the front of this parade? Will growing the green economy ever become a national cause? Definitive answers are fleeting. But in this report, GreenBiz aims to help illuminate the state of the art, including what's working - and what promise remains unfulfilled.
How have GreenBiz used Trucost data?
The U.K. research firm Trucost has been tracking company environmental information for over ten years, and has extensive data on companies' impacts and performance, in addition to how much, environmental information they actually disclose. Each year Trucost measures the financial costs of hundreds of environmental impacts of 4,500 plus companies through an advanced environmental profiling model, which tracks more than 700 environmental impacts and assigns a cost to each impact. This information is used to assess and benchmark individual companies and sectors, and also to track interactions and cash flows in order to map each sector's supply chain.
Using Trucost data GreenBiz was able to look at the aggregate data and gauge overall improvements, or lack thereof, in company environmental performance across the entire economy. The data showed that after a sharp drop in 2008, the financial costs of environmental impacts increased in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available.
GreenBiz was also able to use Trucost data to look at the extent to which companies' disclosed information about their environmental performance. With transparency has become a necessary business factor there is a significant question over how much companies are actually disclosing and how many disclose nothing at all. The data indicated that nearly half of companies are still not disclosing any information, although there was an overall improvement in the degree of transparency, and companies' were generally disclosing more of the environmental impacts most significant to them.
Report image: Environmental financial impacts
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