Coffin makers carry it off

Awards fete UK’s greenest companies
Another sign of the interest in ‘green exemplars’ – the new Sunday Times Best Green Companies awards. A ceremony for the top 10 in mid-May was followed by publication of the top 50 ‘Green List’ (albeit out of just 88 entrants).

Who won, and why? First overall was Tyne and Wear-based coffin manufacturer J C Atkinson and Son, beating a battalion of bigger businesses on an assessment of its environmental performance, policies and practices (addressing its carbon footprint, energy consumption and reduction, waste production and reduction, and supply chain) plus the views of its employees. Company boss Julian Atkinson was highly rated by staff for leading by example, with other positives including the use of sustainably sourced wood for the coffins, a rainwater collection system on the factory roof, and heat and energy generation from a biomass boiler running on wood offcuts and sawdust.

Notwithstanding the celebratory mood, no-one’s kidding themselves that anyone’s perfectly green. “Companies and employees alike have made fantastic progress in adopting green initiatives, but wholesale changes to corporate behaviour are needed to take the whole process much further,” said Will Ullstein of Munro Global, the company that did the surveys.

This Green List appears some seven months after an identically titled supplement in The Guardian, whose rather different purpose was to track the carbon emissions of the FTSE 100. The expertise for that List came from sustainability charity Forum for the Future, where Stephanie Draper, acting director of the business programme, believes that such benchmarking exercises can be useful indicators of who’s moving fastest. She stresses, however, that no company can claim to have ‘got there’ yet across the whole sustainability agenda. “There are some great examples of leadership out there,” says Draper, “but most companies are on a journey – they’re good in parts, but finding other areas more difficult. The important thing is that they go in the right direction.”

The Forum for the Future report 'leader business 2.0’ can be downloaded at www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/leader-business
The Green List on the carbon emissions of the FTSE 100, which Forum produced with The Guardian last November, is also available at http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/node/1012

24 June 2008

Roger East