The good and the ugly

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Portfolio magazine offers up a list of 11 admirably green companies, and paired it with the "Toxic 10" list of companies that should be doing better. I found I was more interested in the bad guys, which I think says less about negativity (or, I hope so) than it says about new information: Companies doing more green are often cited as such, but I don't recall having seen many most-troubling-polluter lists.

I'll just pass on the names of each. You can follow the links if you want to know more.

Good
Starbucks, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Ceres (an investor-advocacy alliance that seeks to improve corporate disclosure and governance), Dupont, General Electric, Innovest (researches and rates corporate environmentalism), Organic Valley, Tesla Motors, and the city of Austin, Texas.

Ugly
RJ Simplot (provides McDonald's with fries), Cargill, Ford, Boeing, Apple, Southern Co. (Southeast US electric utility), American Electric Power (a Midwest electric utility), Massey Energy (Va-based miner that not only digs up coal to be burned, but does it by a reviled "mountaintop removal" process); Chevron, Alcoa.

The mag's reasoning strikes me as borderline in some cases — Apple's cited "sins" don't seem to belong on the same list as mercury polluters, and Tesla rates the good list, apparently, because it makes cars that don't burn hydrocarbons, which is good, but at its price point, how much effect is it really going to have? — but go to the lists and see what you think.

Pointer by Treehugger.


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