Toyota named best green brand

Toyota has topped new rankings of international brands best recognised for their environmental performance.

The Japanese car maker beat multinational product manufacturer 3M into second place, closely followed by German electronics giant Siemens, in a top 10 that was dominated by companies from the automotive and electronics sectors.

The “Best global green brands report”, compiled by international brand consultancy Interbrand, examined the world’s best-known companies in terms of their environmental performance and how the public perceived that performance.

Looking at publically available information, the researchers scored each company against 82 metrics covering environmental performance across six categories – organisational governance, operations, supply chain management, logistics, stakeholder engagement and products.

Toyota’s scored 64.19, with 3M scoring 63.33 and Siemens 63.08. Interbrand confirmed that Toyota is a prime example of an organisation that has made the environment a core management priority and engaged meaningfully with the public.
“As corporate citizenship increasingly becomes the norm, green initiatives may be among the most visible and easiest to claim and yet, can be the most challenging to deliver performance against,” warned Jez Frampton, global CEO at Interbrand.

The strongest green brands, Frampton says have the ability to build stronger connections with consumers as a result of actionable and credible environmental practices.

Interbrand also revealed that the overall rankings of a number of brands, including Nokia, L’Oreal and HSBC, suffered because the companies, while performing well, had failed to engage the public with what they were doing, dragging down their overall scores .

HSBC, ranked 48 with a score of 46.54, was one of only two UK firms listed in the top 50 best green brands alongside Barclays bank at 47.