People across the US are doing their part to fight climate change by buying electric vehicles, installing solar panels, and making decisions big and small to reduce their carbon footprint — and businesses are doing the same.
These actions could make a big difference: According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. industrial and commercial sectors will combine to account for 25% of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions by 2023. (The transportation sector still accounts for the largest share, at 38%).
But which companies are doing the most to reduce their carbon footprint? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer — and an important one for customers and investors who want to support companies that are making greener choices in their operations.
Currently, there are no federal or state regulations that require companies to disclose how much they are reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
To better understand which U.S. companies are making progress, USA TODAY partnered with market research firm Statista to create the second annual “America’s Climate Leaders” list, a clear, data-driven recognition of companies that have significantly reduced their carbon emissions (adjusted by revenue) between 2020 and 2022.
Since last year’s list, there has been a 16% increase in companies that meet the criteria for inclusion on the list. The list includes U.S.-based companies with revenues of $50 million or more that have independently reported their carbon emissions. To be on the list, these companies must have reduced their carbon intensity (carbon emissions divided by revenue) by 3% year over year.
Ohio companies such as Goodyear, Kroger, Wendy’s and Smucker’s made the list.
Twenty-five companies headquartered in Ohio made the USA TODAY list. These are:
- Andersons, Maumee, cuts emissions 38.2% from last year
- Bread Financial, Columbus, down 26.3%
- Columbus building materials installations reduced by 24.6%
- Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Akron, down 23.6%
- J.M. Smucker, Orville, 20.2% reduction
- Owens Corning, Toledo, down 20.1%
- Metalus, Canton, 19.3% reduction
- Advanced Drainage Systems, Hilliard, cut 18.6%
- Dana, Maumee, 18.2% reduction
- Lincoln Electric, Cleveland, cut 16.2%
- Greif, Delaware, cut by 14.4%
- Worthington Industries, Columbus, cut 14.1%
- Materion, Mayfield Heights, down 13.5%
- KeyBank, Cleveland, cut 12.6%
- Wendy’s, Dublin, down 12.3%
- Cardinal Health, Dublin, cut by 11.7%
- Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, 11.4%
- Cintas, Mason cut 10.9%
- Fifth Third Bank, Cincinnati, down 9.8%
- Kroger, Cincinnati, cut 8.9%
- METTLER TOLEDO, Columbus, 8.6% reduction
- Timken, North Canton, cut 7.4%
- Huntington Bancshares, Columbus, down 7.1%
- TransDigm Group, Cleveland, cut 6.3%
- Diebold Nixdorf, Hudson, down 5.3%
For more information on each company, check out the interactive chart at the bottom of this article.
How did Ohio companies and others make it onto USA TODAY’s list of America’s climate leaders?
The first list, created last year, started with 2,000 U.S.-based companies and was narrowed down to 400 that reduced their emissions from 2019 to 2021. The 2024 list has been expanded to 450 companies, and their emissions from 2020 to 2022 were examined.
The ranking uses these and other metrics to understand how well companies are working to reduce their carbon emissions. The analysis includes 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic began, which hit the global economy and caused emissions to fall sharply around the world, making some metrics difficult to assess.
This year’s analysis compares companies’ core emissions adjusted for revenue in 2020 and 2022, a metric known as emissions intensity. 2020 was a particularly bad year for revenue for many companies as the pandemic spread, leading to lower emissions intensity in 2022, but that’s partly due to increased revenue after the pandemic, said Lisa Abels, a senior analyst at Statista who helped compile the list.
“The absolute emissions have not fallen as much as I would have expected or hoped, and this will be important for years to come,” she said. Distortions caused by the pandemic are still present in this year’s data. Some may still be present in the data used for next year’s rankings, but they should be completely gone by 2026, she said.
Overall, U.S. emissions are trending downward overall, with the amount of carbon dioxide the U.S. has emitted falling by 6.6% since 2019. Much of this decline is due to U.S. electricity becoming cleaner.
Why is it so hard to determine which companies are reducing their carbon footprint the most?
In short, the data is messy and inconsistent.
Assessing a company’s climate impact requires a detailed look at multiple, sometimes conflicting, metrics, because there is no requirement for companies to disclose their emissions in the United States, although many companies voluntarily disclose their emissions.
“Data availability is improving,” Abeles said.
Improvements are likely to continue in the future.
Last month, after two years of effort, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission passed new rules requiring some public companies to report on their greenhouse gas emissions and climate risks. The final result was less strong than initially proposed, and the climate disclosure rules won’t go into effect until 2026, the year the first large companies will be required to include the information in their annual reports.
It is unclear when or if the rule will go into effect, as the Court of Appeals has suspended it as of 2024.
California has also enacted climate-related reporting requirements for companies doing business in California with total annual revenues over $500 million, but these do not go into effect until January 2025.
With no national mandates currently in place for reporting carbon pollution, greater transparency and data on corporate emissions is “critically important,” said Christian Leutz, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a research fellow at the Energy Policy Institute. If global companies had to pay for damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the costs could amount to 44% of profits, according to a 2023 study he co-authored.
Having data that helps the public understand how emissions relate to a company’s activities and how they change over time could enable consumers and investors to make informed comparisons between companies, which could have a “real impact”, Royce said.
“Such benchmarks create peer pressure and encourage investors, other stakeholders and customers to demand that companies do more to reduce emissions. The voluntarily public disclosure of this data is an important first step,” he said.
Making such disclosure mandatory “would be even better, as it would shed light on companies that have high emissions but are hesitant to voluntarily provide data,” he added.
How to select companies
The rankings began with a list of more than 2,000 U.S.-based companies with revenues of more than $50 million in 2022. Of those, 700 reported emissions data, allowing for a verifiable ranking.
Below are some of the data and considerations used in the rankings:
- Emission Intensity: The amount of greenhouse gases a company emits relative to its revenue, helping to level the playing field between large and small companies.
- Annual reduction in emission intensity: Calculated from 2020 to 2022. Companies with low reduction rates are excluded.
- Carbon Disclosure Assessment: A measure of a company’s environmental sustainability. These rankings are administered by CDP, a non-profit organization that runs a global disclosure system for companies’ environmental impact.
- Other criteria: Companies were excluded if their known business practices meant they could not be considered climate leaders.
- Data used: Scope 1 and 2 emissions based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the world’s most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standard.
In the full interactive list below, readers can see a variety of criteria, including year-over-year reductions in emissions intensity, emissions intensity, tons of CO2 equivalent emitted by a company, total emissions reductions, and whether a company has participated in the CDP and Science Based Targets initiatives, two highly regarded programs that set and calculate emissions targets.
