Newsweek Green Rankings, one of the world's foremost corporate environmental listings, rank the top publicly traded U.S. and global companies based on their overall environmental performance. The project is driven by an environmental focus across Newsweek's regular rankings features, in particular the 2024 ranking of America's Greenest Companies and America's Most Responsible Companies, the latter of which has a large focus on sustainability.
Here's how those rankings weigh companies' moves to help the environment.
For America's Greenest Companies 2024, Newsweek partnered with data analysts Plant-A and GIST Impact to identify the top 300 U.S. companies based on environmental sustainability. The candidates, which all had publicly disclosed sustainability data, needed a minimum market capitalization of $5 billion to be considered.
The Greenest Companies were scored on more than 25 parameters in four categories: greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, waste generation and sustainability data disclosures and commitments. Some of the 25 individual parameters included things like percentage of energy use that is from renewable sources, efforts to reduce waste generation and frequency of disclosures.
Sixty-two companies of the 300 achieved a perfect five-star rating. Household names like Apple, Mastercard and Pfizer were all ranked with the the top score.
Apple was also the largest company featured in the ranking, based on revenue, followed by UnitedHealth, which achieved four and a half stars, and CVS, which received five stars. IT services—which includes things like cloud technology—was the most represented industry on the list.
In her introduction to the Greenest Companies ranking, Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Nancy Cooper highlighted how it complemented the recent launch of Better Planet, a Newsweek platform "where we highlight innovators and innovations making the world healthier and safer."
Better Planet's mission is to highlight the ways that individual actions can help the environment, because, as its homepage says,"the first step in making a difference is recognizing that we can make a difference." That point-of-view that could also, arguably, be attributed to many of the companies featured on Newsweek's Most Responsible Companies ranking.
The ranking of America's Most Responsible Companies 2024, done in partnership with data-gathering specialist Statista, focuses on a holistic view of corporate responsibility that considered, among other criteria, the three pillars of ESG: environment, social and corporate governance.
For the ranking, several dimensions of environmental data were analyzed, including waste, emissions, energy use, water use and long-term performance.
Within those categories, various KPIs were examined. These included things like a company's amount of recycled waste versus its total waste, its Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions versus its revenue, and the amount of renewable energy it uses versus its total energy usage.
The overall highest-ranked company was pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck, which achieved a score of 91.98 out of 100, which was a combination of an environmental score, a "social concerns" score that considered factors like leadership diversity and employee safety, and a governance score that incorporated disclosure and transparency.
Looking only at the companies' environmental scores, computer maker Dell took the top spot, scoring a perfect 100 in the environmental category. Dell Technologies VP of Corporate Sustainability and ESG Cassandra Garber told Newsweek in a December 2023 article that the company is pushing for a greater use of recycled and sustainably sourced materials in its products.
"For every metric ton of product we put out," she said, "we seek to take a metric ton back."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
