The Sunday Times 60 Best Green Companies - really?
This is not a joke, folks – so stop treating it as one.
Last weekend saw the publication of what is becoming a trendy list to be seen on, The Sunday Times 60 Best Green Companies.
I didn’t fill in an application so I won’t comment on the methodology behind the scoring system, and I certainly don’t want to discourage companies making an effort and engaging with their workforce to arrive at a point where sustainability becomes a mainstream business principle, but I do question some of this back-slapping.
The winner this year is a small company with an already low impact on the environment who market themselves as leaders in ethical marketing, social PR and design. They specialise in marketing and PR to the social sector, so it would seem to be counter-productive if they were socially irresponsible and environmentally negligent. Based on the outputs of the competition, lots of points were awarded for answering questions like “bosses being open to suggestions for environmental improvements”. They reduced paper consumption by a mere 8% and if the data on the Sunday Times listing reads as it is supposed to, although the company use a green tariff (why would you not, with the associated tax breaks?), their gas, electric and water usage increased over their 2008 listing by between 15% and 44%!
Now, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, I applaud any company taking steps in the right direction and I’m not picking on the winner (the price for putting yourself on a pedestal will always be to invite deeper scrutiny), but sustainability needs to become mainstream – not trendy. The business community will not be able to continue to do business as usual by giving employees 5 minutes off for riding to work on a bicycle or engaging the staff in carbon use reduction by giving them knitting needles and wool in the winter so they can knit a scarf while you turn the heating down. The winners can engage in this kind of quirky behaviour because they are a quirky SME PR firm and the publicity has done them no harm, I’m sure.
What I found really fascinating is that the runner up, the 2nd best green company in the UK, is also a media company; this one, however, is in mainstream media publishing, they have over 800 staff and their carbon use is down across the board since this time last year, they have been ISO 14001 accredited for a while and tick all the green boxes (unlike our winners who got there on ‘feel good’ rather than actual delivery of carbon and resource impact reduction).
I conducted a business green audit for a well respected law firm in the City recently; it turned out that they were routinely doing lots of things to reduce their impact on the environment… they just didn’t realise they were actually a good example of responsible and sustainable business and don’t even publicise their efforts. These are the sort of business we should be celebrating (as well as our 2nd placed listing on the Sunday Times Green list). These are businesses that are applying environmental considerations to the efficient running of the enterprise; they are being green and lean for established business reasons – the long term survival and growth of the business.
The Sunday Times needs to rethink its strategy if it wishes to continue to be taken seriously and the company that orchestrated itself into top spot should stop treating sustainability as just a means to get business through ‘fun stuff’ and work a little harder on reducing its environmental impact instead of increasing its depletion of water and carbon resource (and how about getting ISO 14001… now!).
This is not a joke, folks – so stop treating it as one.
