Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft crack top five of list of sustainable companies

Apple’s had quite the month: The company said it will commit over $500 billion in domestic manufacturing and expansion over the next four years, it might be rolling out a whole new design for the iPhone, and it topped the Clean200 list of sustainable companies for the third year in a row.

The list—on which Apple is followed by battery manufacturer CATL, Microsoft, and Tesla—ranks companies based on how much revenue each put toward sustainable processes and materials, like green HVAC systems, sustainable agriculture, and water efficiency technologies.

To be eligible for the list, companies must be large cap, publicly traded, and “earn more than 10% of total revenues from clean sources.”

Andrew Behar, the CEO of As You Sow, the nonprofit that produces the list alongside magazine Corporate Knights, told Tech Brew that the more money a company makes, the more it’s able to spend on sustainability.

“The most revenue [gets] you higher up,” Behar said. “Apple makes a lot of money, so that’s significant: The way that they have their minerals mined, the way that they get certified, all that stuff.”

Behar said that As You Sow and Corporate Knights created the list in 2016 to help people who wanted to “move away” from owning stock in oil and gas companies find alternatives in which to invest.

“If you had invested $10,000 in the Clean200 and then every year updated your portfolio, you would more than double outperform the all world energy index,” Behar said. “We’re just trying to help people with analysis—we’re not investment advisors.”

Catch and release: The list’s methodology can’t catch everything, though, and Behar said there are some companies that the list may exclude in the future because of their controversial behavior, like Microsoft re-opening Three Mile Island to fuel its data centers. Behar also acknowledged that some who model their investment portfolios after the Clean200 may want to exclude Tesla because of CEO Elon Musk’s involvement in the federal government.

“Elon is doing damage; he’s harming a lot of people,” Behar said. “But [looking at] it purely on a climate basis, Tesla has done a lot of good.”