Ideas

Clean Capitalism: “There’s an App for That!”


Here at Kiosk, we proudly promote green and sustainable business practice at all of our offices and are delighted when we see other companies doing the same thing. We recently stumbled across Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based company “focused on quantifying and animating clean capitalism drivers for decision makers,” created the CK Ranker. An app that not only lets you look at information about existing companies around the world, but allows you to add your own company’s ingredients and see how you measure up against the competition.

So what makes a company sustainable? The CK Ranker uses the following criteria:

– Energy Productivity: The return on energy used, dividing revenue by energy use and compared against others in the same industry
– Carbon productivity: Revenue divided by greenhouse gas emissions
– Water productivity: Revenue divided by water use
– Waste Productivity: Revenue divided by waste produced
– Innovation Capacity: Ratio of research and development investment to revenue
– % Tax paid: Where social responsibility is recognized as part of sustainability
– CEO to Average worker pay: Examines how many multiples the CEO gets paid over what the average employee takes home
– Pension fund status, Safety Performance, Employee turnover: How employees are treated matters
– Leadership Diversity: If and how many women or minorities are on the board of directors
– Clean Capitalism Pay Link: If there is a mechanism for actually rewarding people for reducing emissions or improving carbon efficiency

Whether you’re just wondering how you stack up against the rest, or you want to dig deeper and find ways to establish or expand your sustainability efforts, CK Ranker is a great place to start. Utilizing this type of data can make for great PR, showing your clients what really matters to your company which will help you establish loyalty among your consumer base. Plus, the more aware you are of your environmental performance, the more likely you are to improve it.

For Kiosk, we are always looking for ways to improve our sustainability efforts by only working with other local businesses. Currently all of our offices are outfitted with some re-used or re-purposed furniture and we only use 30% – 100% recycled paper for our on-site printing needs. When using off-site printers, we only contract local with green certified printers who use soy based inks. In addition, we work with our clients to use less hard or paper goods in their marketing efforts while leading them to use more online media outlets.

Kiosk UK was Liverpool’s first Carbon Neutral company, and Kiosk US is a Bay Area Green Business.