I’m skeptical about efforts to rank and rate green or sustainable companies, and I have been for a time. [See 100 Best Corporate Citizens? What a CROck!] It’s terribly difficult to compare big and small companies, retailers with manufacturers, software firms with oil companies, etc. We once tried at FORTUNE, and gave up because we decided it couldn’t be done right.

Having said that, I’m impressed with the rigor and methodology used by a Canadian magazine called Corporate Knights to produce its 8th annual list of Global 100 Most Sustainable Companies, which it calls “the most extensive data-driven corporate sustainability assessment in existence.” The ratings are transparent and they encompass social as well as environmental metrics, among them energy, carbon, waste and water productivity, diversity and employee turnover, safety and, interestingly, the ratio between CEO and average worker pay–a revealing metric that most such rankings do not include. Disclousre: While I played no part in putting the list together, I did write a profile of Novo Nordisk, the top-ranked company, for Corporate Knights.

A couple of things to note about the list. First, US companies perform poorly. There’s not one US-based company in the top 10. Intel (No. 18) Life Technologies (No. 15) is the highest ranked US-based firm, followed by Intel (18), Agilent (59), Johnson Controls (64), Procter & Gamble (66) and IBM (69). Lest you suspect a Canadian bias, our neighbors to the north did no better. The top-ranked Canadian firm was Suncor (48), which calls itself an “oil sands pioneer. Go figure.

Of the 22 countries with companies that made the list,  the UK led the way with 16 Global 100 companies, followed by Japan with 11 and France and the US with eight. Northern European countries (Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden) punched above their weight, which isn’t surprising.

Interestingly, these more sustainable companies have outperformed their peers. Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights, said in a news release: “In a year in which Wall Street was occupied and capitalism became a bad word, the Global 100 companies serve as ambassadors for a better, cleaner kind of capitalism which, it also turns out, is more profitable.” The magazine reported:

From its inception on February 1 2005 to December 31, 2011, the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations has achieved a total return of 41.70%, outperforming its benchmark, (the MSCI All Country World Index at 29.30%) by more than 11%.

How did Novo Nordisk reach the top? According to Corporate Knights, the Danish pharmaceutical firm

is on record that access to essential medicines is a human right, and sells human insulin (the most basic kind) to 33 of the world’s poorest countries, at no more than 20 per cent of the average price in the western world. On the key clean capitalism metrics measured by Corporate Knights, Novo Nordisk scored top quartile performance in energy productivity ($4,851 in revenue generated per unit of energy consumption, compared to a pharmaceutical sector average of $3,603), carbon productivity ($68,585 in revenue generated per unit of carbon emitted, compared to a pharmaceutical sector average of $56,414) and pay equity (CEO/average employee remuneration ratio of 15 vs. a pharmaceutical sector average of 93). Novo Nordisk is the only pharmaceutical company within the Global 100 to report linking CEO remuneration to corporate performance on clean capitalism KPIs.

What impressed me about Novo Nordisk was how deeply sustainability issues are woven into the fabric of the company. In my story, I write about the firm’s approach to drug pricing, to climate and energy issues and to China. Here’s how the story begins:

Don’t ask Novo Nordisk for the company’s corporate responsibility report. The Danish pharmaceutical firm, which had revenues of DKK 60.7 billion (US$10.5 billion) in 2010, doesn’t publish one. Instead, Novo Nordisk reports on its environmental and social performance – including water and energy consumption, waste reduction, employee turnover, the diversity of its management team, new patent filings and charitable donations – alongside its financial performance in a single annual report.

This integrated approach to reporting reflects the way business is done at Novo Nordisk, the world leader in diabetes care and the No. 1 firm on the 2012 list of Corporate Knights Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations. Novo Nordisk has pursued a triple bottom line of financial, social and environmental gains since the 1990s, when the phrase was coined by writer John Elkington, and it incorporated the concept into the company’s legal structure nearly a decade ago.

“The main foundation for Novo Nordisk is the triple bottom line because that is what’s protecting our license to operate,” says Lars Rebien Sorensen, the firm’s president and CEO. “That begs and obliges everybody in the company not only to see that we become a good business – that’s the financial bottom line – but that we do so in a way that is socially and environmentally responsible.”

Lise Kingo, who has worked on sustainability issues since joining Novo Nordisk in 1988, says the company’s business case for corporate responsibility goes well beyond protecting its license to operate. Today, she says, the firm envisions sustainability as a way to drive innovation, and finds that engaging with stakeholders helps spot business opportunities as well as avert trouble. One sign of the value that the company places on sustainability is the fact that Kingo, 50, has been part of Novo Nordisk’s five-person executive management team since 2002.

You can read the rest here.

And, speaking of rankings, I was pleased once again to be named to the Ethisphere Institute’s 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics. Lists are fun so long as we don’t take them too seriously. (Really, how do you compare the influence of federal prosecutor Preet Bharara, Russian blogger Alexei Navalny and Walmart CEO Mike Duke, all of whom are in the top 15?) Still, some of the business people on the list whose work I know certainly deserve to be spotlighted, including Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, Jeffrey Swartz of Timberland, Brian Dunn of Best Buy, Yalmaz Siddiqui of Office Depot and Bob Corcoran of GE. I was also thrilled to see my friend Liz Maw, the executive director of Net Impact (where I’m on the board), be recognized for the great work that she, her staff and the organization are doing.

Yalmaz Siddiqui is a dark-green environmentalist, who once started a business called, of all things, “eco-eco.” But in his job as the senior director for environmental strategy at Office Depot, the $11.6-billion a year office-products giant based in Boca Raton, FL, he doesn’t talk about saving the planet. Instead, he focuses on the  business benefits of sustainability, particularly those that accrue to Office Depot’s customers.

“It really is rare for me to invoke climate change or landfills or toxicity in my internal arguments,” Yalmaz says.  “We’re in Florida. We’re not in San Francisco or the Pacific Northwest. Impassioned arguments about environmental issues don’t resonate.”

Whatever his approach, it seems to be working: Office Depot has green cred. In Newsweek’s ranking of U.S. companies, they were the top retailer and No. 8 overall,  ahead of rival Staples (17), Best Buy (19),  J.C. Penny (64), Starbucks (82) and Whole Foods Market (106). While the rankings are debatable, Newsweek wrote:

Office Depot, at No. 8, is the single retailer to make it into the U.S. top 10. It’s had its share of operational successes—saving 3,000 tons of wood and up to $1.5 million a year simply by delivering goods in paper bags rather than cardboard boxes, for instance. But, as with IBM, perhaps more significant are the tools Office Depot provides to its largest customers, including cities, states, and large corporations. It shows customers the environmental and financial tradeoffs of their purchasing decisions on everything from copy paper to cleaning supplies.

This customer-centric approach helps explain what Office Depot can do, and what it can’t, when it comes to “green.” You won’t see solar on the roofs of  Office Depot stores, at least for now, because the return on the investment is insufficient.  You will see attention paid to energy efficiency because the ROI makes sense, and you will see even more attention paid to selling greener products because profits from those sales drop right to the bottom line.

I spoke to Yalmaz by phone the other day because I’m  interested in how people inside companies — intrapreneurs, they’re sometimes called — promote change. There’s a small army of these folks in corporate America, and the work they do matters. With Washington gridlocked (or worse) on environmental issues, it’s up to corporate America (as well as state and local government) to deliver the change we need.

Yalmaz, who is 41, started “eco-eco” after college to sell organic clothing, reusable organic cotton bags and other dark-green stuff. “It didn’t resonate with the marketplace,” he said. Subsequently, he got a masters in environment and development, did consulting work with PwC and IBM focusing on the forest, paper and packaging industries and then joined Office Depot in 2006.

The company divides its environmental strategy in three: Be Greener, Buy Greener and Sell Greener. Be Greener focuses on internal operations, and this is mostly about saving money. Mostly but not entirely: Office Depot, as you’d expect, buys recycled paper, for which there’s essentially no business case. (If classical economists were right about how the world works, there’s be no recycled paper. It costs more and performs no better than paper made from virgin forest.)

But, as Yalmaz notes: “It’s an iconic product, when it comes to organizational greening. It’s the everyday symbol of environmental commitment. It’s very tangible.” Through its purchasing requirements, he explained, the federal government helped create the market for recycled paper.

Office Depot also got a lot of attention for replacing cardboard boxes with lighter weight bags when delivering supplies to institutional customers. That was a double win, saving the company money and pleasing customers. “It was sold as way to satisfy customer desire to have less packaging,” Yalmaz says.

Office Depot also took a pragmatic, customer-driven approach when it set out to define greener products. The firm looked at the purchasing policies of key, leading-edge buyers like the EPA and the U.S. Green Building Council, rather than setting out on its own to measure the environmental impact of what it sells. “We’ve tried to make the definition of green products as simple and accessible as possible,” Yalmaz says. That’s a different approach from the one taken by Walmart and its partners in The Sustainability Consortium, who are setting out to do complex, science-based life cycle analyses of thousands of products.

Unlike Walmart, Office Depot hasn’t set big attention-getting goals like zero waste or being powered entirely by renewable energy. It’s ranked No. 16,  behind Staples (No. 4) and Walmart (No. 5) in EPA’s list of the top 20 retail green power partners. But, to its credit, Office Depot is unusually transparent about its environmental performance, posting a dashboard that tracks its progress or lack thereof. For example, you can see that the percentage of copy paper sold with post-consumer recycled content actually fell between 2008 and 2010.

This week, to spur sales of green products, Office Depot recognized 25 of its own customers for their “leadership in greener purchasing.” Winners from the FORTUNE 500 include Chevron, JP Morgan Chase, Google, Bechtel and Comerica. Says Yalmaz: “If I was to be asked, what is the ultimate metric of success of our environmental program, I’d say it was ‘green spend’ by customer.”

To borrow a phrase from economist and author Gernot Wagner, but will the planet notice? That’s hard to say. Clearly, if Office Depot sells a lot more greener products in place of conventional products, we’ll be better off. And if greener corporate behavior paves the way for the political action needed to have a big impact on climate change and other issues, great. “Normalization of green behavior works better than a message of environmental guilt,” Yalmaz says. On the other hand, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that buying recycled paper or Pilot pens made out of recycled bottles (try them, they’re cool) get us where we need to go. It won’t.

Elizabeth Grossman

Today’s guest post comes from Elizabeth Grossman, a gifted environmental journalist who is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, YaleEnvironment360, The Washington Post, The Nation and Grist. I met Lizzie this past fall at the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference; she’s been writing about science and the environment for more than a decade.

She reported this story by taking EPA data uncovered by the Center for Public Integrity, and checking it against publicly-available information from OSHA. Her story got my attention because it suggests (based on admittedly limited evidence) that companies that are careless or irresponsible about air pollution also have workplace-safety issues. I wasn’t surprised to see BP among them–my FORTUNE colleagues David Whitford and Peter Elkind did a great job dissecting its culture in BP: “An Accident Waiting to Happen.’  Seeing DuPont on the list did surprise me, since the company is known for its safety culture. This story first appeared at The Pump Handle, a website about public health and the environment.

We have learned from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request and released by the Center for Public Integrity earlier this month that there are currently about 465 United States industrial facilities on what the EPA calls its “watch list.” The list is made up of businesses EPA considers chronic violators of the Clean Air Act – but against which the agency has taken no formal enforcement action. An examination of these same companies’ occupational health and safety records reveals them also to be chronic violators of Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) standards.

The proliferation of labels and claims at the grocery store can befuddle even the most conscientious consumer. What to buy? Organic produce? Locally grown vegetables? MSC-certified fish? Fair Trade coffee or chocolate?

Paul Rice, the president and CEO of Fair Trade USA, isn’t worried by the clutter. All the labels, he says, reflect a big trend–the growing appetite of food shoppers for  more “transparency and traceability.”

Says Rice: “Consumers want to know where their stuff is coming from. They want to know if it’s safe. They want to know if it’s healthy. They want to know what the impact is on the environment.”

“Consumers are increasingly using their purchasing decisions to express their values,” he says.

Of course, we’ve been hearing for decades that consumers are voting with their dollars; the trouble is, too many of us vote for crap too much of the time. But–and this is important–there’s good news when it comes to Fair Trade: Despite the sluggish US economy, it’s growing fast.

Sales of Fair Trade Certified products at mainstream grocery stores grew by 87 percent in the second quarter of 2011 over the previous quarter, according to recent data from  SPINS, which tracks the natural foods industry. Sales in the specialty and gourmet channels grew by 32 percent, for an overall growth rate of 63 percent.

What’s more, the range of products that are Fair Trade certified is expanding rapidly to include not just coffee, tea, cocoa and bananas, all which are grown in the tropics, but also sugar, flowers, honey, herbs and spices, beans and grains, wine and, most recently, apparel and sports equipment.

[Disclosure: After I'd begun writing this story, the people at Fair Trade USA, which is the leading independent certifier of Fair Trade products in the U.S., sent me a basket of goodies that included coffee, tea, chocolate bars, honey, Honest Cocoa Nova, Pink Guava Drizzle and a soccer ball. Let me know, please, if you've got a great recipe that calls for Pink Guava Drizzle.]

I spoke via Skype the other day with Paul Rice and Robert Grgrurev, a brand manager at Green & Black’s Organic chocolate which is going 100% Fair Trade, to learn more about Fair Trade and its impact.

Paul, who is 50 and a graduate of Yale and Berkeley’s Haas business school, got into the Fair Trade arena after spending 11 years in Nicaragua as a rural development specialist, mostly working with farming cooperatives, for nonprofit groups.  There, he started and led a successful Fair Trade and organic coffee export cooperative called PRODECOOP, which, he told me, started him on a journey of “local empowerment and community development, none of it thanks to anyone’s charity.”

“It totally changed my view on the role of markets and the role of corporate partnerships,” he said.  “What I learned was that the market could be an incredibly powerful ally in the quest for social justice.”

Formerly known as Transfair, the nonprofit Fair Trade USA has been operating in the U.S. since 1998, decades after the idea was introduced in Europe. Its aim, in essence, is to make globalization an ally of the poor. The organization says:

Instead of creating dependency on aid, we use a market-based approach that gives farmers fair prices, workers safe conditions, and entire communities resources for fair, healthy and sustainable lives.

Farmers can be certified as Fair Trade only after meeting workplace and environmental standards. They are then  guaranteed a premium price for their commodities, and encouraged to invest their earnings in education, economic and community development.

Annual retail sales of Fair Trade products are estimated to be $1.5 billion in the US and $5 billion globally, Paul told me. “Our growth has been amazing,” he said, “and it’s held constant and strong during the recession.” Their research indicates that about 35% of people are aware of the Fair Trade label, and about half of those buy Fair Trade goods. More than 800 companies now sell Fair Trade products; many are small mission-driven firms like Green and Black’s but others, like Starbucks, Unilever and Coca Cola, whose Honest Tea unit is entirely Fair Trade, are much bigger. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, a public company, is the world’s biggest purchaser of Fair Trade coffee.

Fair Trade USA estimates that its work has put a total of $220 million of extra money into the pockets of farmers in the global south. That goes a long way in economies where many people live on just a few dollars a day.

To continue to grow the category, Fair Trade USA needs to stimulate both the demand for and the supply of Fair Trade products. On the demand side, the organization plans to release a Fair Trade finder app for mobile phones next month. It’s also going to launch a marketing campaign around the theme of Every Purchase Matters.

One goal is to encourage more brands to follow companies like Green & Black, which is converting all of its products to Fair Trade. “Fair Trade is not a dabble. It’s not just a flavor. it’s core to our company,” says Grgrurev.

To insure buyers that they will have access to a reliable supply of Fair Trade certified products, Paul said, the group is testing new standards that will allow larger farms and farm workers in the coffee, sugar and cocoa industries to qualify for certification. Currently, the group certifies cooperatives and small farmers but not larger businesses.

“We’ll be certifying coffee farms and cocoa farms of all sizes,” Rice says, to increase the movement’s impact.

“In our view, small is not beautiful.”

Rice growing in Arkansas

Genetically-engineered crops may help feed the world. But people who choose not to consume what alarmists call Frankenfoods should not be forced to eat them. So the ability of the government to regulate and industry to manage genetically-modified crops matters. It matters a lot.

Unhappily, there’s reason to believe that neither the government nor the industry is up to the job.

If you doubt it, consider the strange saga of an experimental strain of genetically-engineered rice that somehow escaped from a test plot and found its way into the food supply before it was approved for human consumption. Settling the subsequent lawsuits will  cost agricultural giant Bayer CropScience a whopping $750 million, the company said in July. The rice, meanwhile, has been withdrawn from the market and has not produced a dime of revenue for the company. It hasn’t fed anyone except battalions of lawyers.

I  first came across the rice story in 2007, and wrote a story for FORTUNE headlined Attack of the Mutant Rice. I had a great time reporting the story, visiting rice farmers in Stuttgart, Arkansas (“The Rice and Duck Capital of the World”) where the nation’s two biggest rice mills are located and learning what I could about the regulation of GMOs.

It’s important to note that the biotech rice, which known as Liberty Link Rice because its genes had been altered to resist a weed killer called Liberty, posed no known health or environmental risks. But its spread exposed flaws in the regulatory system and cost thousands of rice farmers money because once it became known that the biotech rice had infiltrated the food supply, Japanese and European buyers (who don’t want genetically-modified crops) stopped importing rice from the U.S. for a time. Nearly half of the nation’s rice crop, which is worth about $1.5 billion at the farm level,  is exported. So prices fell, leading to about 400 lawsuits on behalf.

For many of America’s 8,000 rice farmers–who never wanted Liberty Link rice in the first place, because their overseas customers don’t want it–this was a horror story. Darryl Little, a widely-respected official who directs the Arkansas State Plant Board, told me: “This is the most traumatic thing I’ve seen in the rice industry in 30 years. It’s been devastating.”

The lessons here are many.

Yes, there was (biotech) rice in your beer

First, getting unwanted, biotech foods out of the food supply  is even harder, it turns out, than putting the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. As I wrote in FORTUNE:

If in the past year or so you or your family ate Uncle Ben’s, Rice Krispies, or Gerber’s, or drank a Budweiser – Anheuser Busch is America’s biggest buyer of rice – you probably ingested a little bit of Liberty Link, with the unapproved gene. (A very little bit – perhaps ten to 15 grains of transgenic rice in a one-pound bag of rice, which contains about 29,000 grains.)

Second, biotech crops aren’t easy to control once they have been planted. This is a significant issue because it casts doubt on an idea called “coexistence”–that biotech crops and, say, organic crops can live side by side. Indeed, government efforts to solve the rice mystery — which consumed more than 3500 hours of investigative time, according to this report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture — never determined “the exact time period and means of incursion” of the engineered gene into conventional rice seeds. If you can’t pinpoint the problem, how can you prevent it from happening again?

Third, the industry failed in this case to police itself. The USDA report found seven instances in which field trials of the biotech rice took place outside of permitted time periods. This summer’s settlement came after a series of so-called bellwether trials in several states that allowed lawyers for both sides to see how juries reacted to the evidence — and in most case, they were decidedly unfriendly to Bayer.

As Don Downing, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, told the Delta Farm Press:

It’s interesting that out of 50 to 60 jurors in all these cases, every single one of them found Bayer was negligent in letting (the GM traits) get out and contaminate the rice supply. Every one of them found that by doing that it harmed farmers… The jurors were unanimous on Bayer’s negligence.

To be fair, this was a problem that Bayer Crop Sciences inherited. It acquired the U.S. biotech business of Aventis, a French pharmaceutical giant, back in 2001, and dropped plans to bring the Liberty Link rice to market even before the scandal surfaced. The company said: “Bayer CropScience believes it acted responsibly in the handling of its biotech rice.”

Maybe. Like the farmers who sued Bayer–many of whom grow biotech crops other than rice–I’m not opposed to genetically-modified crops. (See my blogpost, Biotech food for a warming planet.) Indeed, I’m sympathetic to the claim that a regulatory morass stands in the way of broader adoption of GM crops, as biologist Nina Federoff recently argued on The Times op-ed page.

But until the regulators and the industry get their house in order, they will rightfully find it hard to persuade skeptics that biotech crops can be responsibly managed–in a way that protects the rights not only of those who want to grow them, but also of those who do not.

My mornings often begin with a run along the Capital Crescent Trail in Bethesda, Md., and a visit to Quartermaine’s, a neighborhood hangout where the coffee’s great, the baristas are friendly and the pastries are tempting. Often, I yield to temptation. If Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest had his way, they’d serve nothing but oatmeal with skim milk, no salt.

Last week, Jacobson assailed the Campbell Soup Co. after its new CEO, Denise Morrison, told investment analysts that the company “plans to bring back some higher-sodium soups after several years of working to reduce sodium, sometimes at the expense of taste,” according to the AP. Sales of the low-sodium soup were disappointing.

Jacobson wrote:

If Campbell has reason to believe consumers don’t like the taste of their products, why resort to salt? Why not improve their soups with more and better-quality vegetables and chicken, or with herbs and spices? I suppose that’s a question that answers itself, and the answer is money. Campbell enjoys a huge profit margin selling what are often basically overpriced disease-promoting cans of salt and water.

Yikes! This “public interest” advocate doesn’t think much of the public, does he, since, in his view, they are wasting their money on “overpriced disease-promoting cans of salt and water.”

His blast made news, as CSPI often does. More than 300 stories, according to Google News, like this one from ABC News.

So what’s wrong with this picture? A couple of things.

First, it reflects an unfortunate blurring of the lines between “corporate responsibility” and personal responsibility. Is Quartermaine’s responsible for my pastry consumption? Should Campbell limit its offerings to low-sodium soups if consumers don’t want them? What about Ben & Jerry’s? This isn’t to suggest that corporations don’t bear some responsibility for the obesity crisis–they do, as I’ll explain below–but as a society, we’ll never get people to take responsibility for their own health and well-being if we point the finger at others.

Second, it misunderstands the power of business. Assume Campbell decided to sell only low-sodium soups. (No more Chicken Noodle, with its whopping 890mg per serving. The FDA currently recommends no more than 2,300 mg — roughly a teaspoon — of salt per day.) Shoppers would simply turn to other brands–or buy a frozen pizza instead.

It should go without saying that companies can’t force us to buy stuff we don’t want. Power in the market belongs, for the most part, to buyers and not to sellers.

When they become buyers, companies like Campbell–as well as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.–can have a meaningful impact. They should be held accountable, not so much for what they sell, as for what they buy.

Here, as it happens, Campbell record is not too shabby. Outgoing CEO Douglas Conant told my GreenBiz colleague Heather King last spring that the company is “cutting the environmental footprint of [its] product portfolio in half” by working with farmers to better manage pesticides, improve yields and cut costs. The company is cutting water use and CO2 emissions per ton of product produced. Most of the company’s products, aside from tomatoes (about which more, another day), are locally farmed.

I called Dave Stangis, Campbell vice president of sustainability, to learn a bit more. He told me that Campbell has pledged to dramatically reduce its package and that he’d just come from a meeting with a cocoa supplier to the Pepperidge Farm brand, which is part of Campbell, where they’d talked about sustainable cocoa production. The company is working with all its farmer-suppliers to improve their environmental performance. “We teach them, and they teach us,” Dave says.

Does this get Campbell off the hook when it comes to salt and obesity. No–but it seems to me that, as a major food company (2010 revenues: $7.7 billion), Campbell ought to offer healthy options, if only to appeal to health-conscious shoppers. That it does. A Campbellexec told ABC News:

The company will extend its Healthy Request line from 25 soups to 33, all of which are reduced-sodium and carry the American Heart Association’s stamp of approval.

So what are the responsibilities of of a big food company, when it comes to obesity? First, and most important, be transparent. Second, offer a range of choices–which most do. Third, stop marketing unhealthy food to children. Fourth, think hard about the impact of portion size, and reduce portions if you can. Finally, if you are a food service company or retailer, as opposed to a manufacturer, try to nudge customers to choose healthier foods, as Sodexo and Bon Appetit have done. (See Where’s the Beef? Sodexo’s Meatless Mondays and The Low Carb(on) Diet.)

CSPI, to its credit, has put many of these issues on the national agenda. Its lab tests of the fat and calories in movie popcorn help me to resist that particular temptation. CSPI has also done a great job spotlighting excessive fat, calories and salt in restaurants like Ruby Tuesday and Uno Chicago Grill.

Having said that, obesity is really complicated. A variety of factors come into play–everything from the spread of video games to suburban neighborhoods without sidewalks to cutbacks in school gym and the crappy food served at school lunches. Brian Wansink, author of a book called Mindless Eating, has said we live in an obesogenic environment–one that promotes overeating in a variety of ways.

Such as saltier soups? Sure. But let’s keep things in perspective, folks.

No company approaches sustainability more comprehensively—or more creatively—than the British retailer Marks & Spencer.

M&S is the UK’s largest clothing retailer and a big seller of food too (market share 3.9%). It operates about 1,000 stores and employs about 78,000 people. Its supply chain includes 2,000 factories and 20,000 farms. Some 21 million customers visit the stores each week, and revenues last year were £9.7 billion ($15.7 billion).

The company’s sustainability effort, which is called Plan A – because  there’s no plan B to protect the planet — touches executives, rank-and-file employees, customers and suppliers. Executive pay is based, in part, on meeting sustainability targets.  Store managers compete to save energy and waste. Factories and farmers that sell to M&S are rewarded for going “green.” Increasingly, customers invited to get involved, too.

“Plan A, at heart, is a change-management tool,” says Mike Barry, head of sustainable business for M&S.

I met Mike this week at M&S headquarters in London. M&S is making demonstrable short-term progress towards big long-term goals (about which, more below) but what stuck in my mind were these examples of how Plan A is changing the way the retailer does business:

Cleaning out the closet: M&S and Oxfam have teamed up to reward shoppers for recycling unwanted clothes bought at M&S. The clothes are donated to Oxfam, which raised about £3.3 million ($T.K million) by reselling them. Anyone donating an item of M&S clothing to Oxfam gets a £5 voucher to use on a purchase of £35 or more on clothing, homeware or beauty products at M&S. This develops brand loyalty, and points to the circular economy of the future, where stuff is recycled and make into something else instead of being thrown away.

Selling energy, along with food and clothing: Capitalizing on the strength of its brand, as well as its reputation for sustainability, M&S has become a retailer of electricity and gas. “The first market proposition is great customer service,” Barry tells me, but once they sign up customers–they have “hundreds of thousands now”–they offer advice on saving energy and saving money, and then try sell them energy-efficient appliances and home insulation. Again, customers get rewarded with M&S vouchers, so there’s a clear benefit to “green” behavior.

That carbon-neutral bra: M&S’s carbon-neutral undies, unveiled in April, are more than a marketing gimmick. They’re a way to showcase an energy-efficient  factory in Sri Lanka that was built as part of Plan A and powered, in part, by solar energy and bydropower. They were also a challenge for the company, as it delved into the  complexities of carbon footprinting. (Believe it or not, the bra contains 21 component parts from 12 different suppliers.) To offset the CO2 generated by the bra’s manufacturing and shipping, M&S is planting 6,000 trees in Sri Lanka, some of which are lime and mango trees intended to generate income for farmers.

The context for all of these activities is a thorough, detailed and transparent plan—180 commitments, involving store and fleet operations, farming practices, animal welfare, healthy food, voluntarism, diversity, you name it. Employees are offered free energy monitors and insulation for their homes. Websites are being built for millions of customers who want to set their own personal sustainability goals. Products are being refashioned–every blend of coffee served in M&S Cafes is now Fairtrade, organic and Rainforest Alliance Certified.

Among the results: Total carbon emissions are down by 13% since 2006, even though the chain has grown. The company recycles 94% of its waste. M&S generates an impressive 54% of its energy from renewable sources. It gets 90% of its wild fish and 76% of its wood from sustainable sources.

All of this is being driven by the bottom line, Mike told me. “There’s no obvious government impetus to keep going,” he said. Nor are customers demanding change, although they want to do business with responsible companies. But, he said, M&S has saved money by becoming more efficient.

Mike Barry

“Irrespective of what others want us to do, we want to keep our costs down,” he said. The company has saved about $80 million per year by focusing on “lots of little things that, on their own, you’d never get to” that were brought to the forefront by Plan A. It has generated another $20 million in new revenues attributed to Plan A. It’s also working to secure future supplies of such key commodities as palm oil, soy, cocoa, beef and coffee.

Of course, everything is not going according to Plan. Sales of organic food are down because of the recession. Business travel reductions have not been realized. Sourcing of sustainable cotton has proved more difficult than imagined.

But, unlike many U.S. companies, M&S is thinking systemically about the environment, going beyond eco-efficiency and aiming for a business model that is truly sustainable.

“Zero carbon, zero waste, not just protecting natural resources but restoring them,” Barry said. “Wherever we touch a human life, we want Marks & Spencer to add value.”

It’s a bold vision, but until companies rethink consumption, as well as production, they’ll merely being doing “less bad” — when what we need is for business to do more good.

Can we shop our way to sustainability in the supermarket aisle?

Eco labels are cluttered, confusing and unreliable.

Organic food gets a tiny slice of the market.

Most shoppers don’t pay much attention to environmental factors. Perhaps understandably so. They’re busy, or  ignorant. Or they don’t care.

Which makes me believe that we can’t count on consumers to bring about a sustainable food system.

So, like it or not, that it’s going to be up to business to fix the food system.

That’s my takeaway from today’s discussions at the Sustainable Food Institute, part of Cooking for Solutions, a great event on food/ag/sustainability organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m here for a couple of days of good talk, good food, good wine, shared by reporters, chefs, people in the food business, scientists, activists and a farmer or two.

In several panel discussions–one on eco-labels, another about the popular but nevertheless limited Seafood Watch program run by the aquarium, and also during my own interview with Louise Nicholls, a sustainability executive from the British food and department store Marks & Spencer–it became clear to me that the dizzying complexity of food and agriculture systems, including as they do health, environmental and economic concerns, will make it very difficult to communicate simply to shoppers what’s “good” and what is not, even assuming scientists can reach consensus on that.

Persuading shoppers to then change their habits is even tougher.

Consider Seafood Watch, known best for the wallet-sized pocket guides that rank popular seafood choices as green (recommended), yellow (good alternatives) and red (avoid). By most measures, Seafood Watch, whose recommendations are science-based and peer reviewed, has been a big hit. The aquarium has given away nearly 40 million guides, and millions more have been accessed on smartphones and the web.

Here’s the thing, though: Only about 500,000 consumers regularly use the guide, the aquarium’s market research has found. What’s more, the guide is limited in its scope–it focuses on healthy oceans, but doesn’t take into account social issues, workers rights or carbon emissions. A fresh Alaskan salmon that travels by air to a New York City restaurant can get the green light.

The good news? Chefs and retailers are paying more attention to Seafood Watch. “We didn’t have the ear of business ten years ago,” said Sheila Bowman, senior outreach manager at Seafood Watch. “Things have changed.” What’s more, they are getting recommendations on 2,000 kinds of fish, not just the 70 in the pocket guide.

Similarly, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which has a consumer-facing label, has been gaining ground with big companies. Just last week, the MSC said, Kroger, Costco, Supervalu and Walmart announced new seafood commitments around MSC standards. Kroger, for example, which has about 2,500 stores in 31 states, has set a 2015 goal of sourcing 100% of its top 20 wild-caught species from “sources that are certified by MSC, in full assessment, or involved in a Fishery Improvement Project with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).” Big retailers, in other words, are increasingly making sustainable choices on behalf of consumers.

Other ecolabels almost inevitably capture only one or two attributes of a food product. This poses dilemmas for even the most conscientious consumers.

Are organic grapes from Chile better than conventional local grapes? Should you favor Fair Trade or Rainforest Alliance-certified coffee? Industry-backed labels like the food industry’s Smart Choice initiative are not just confusing but misleading, as we learned a couple of years ago when Froot Loops and Cocoa Krispies were deemed Smart Choices.

Jon Johnson of the University of Arkansas and The Sustainability Consortium made a great point–that no label can be universal (applicable to many product categories), accurate and simple. You can have two of those three, but not all three–and in particular there are tensions between accurate and simple. For its part, the Sustainability Consortium is engaging, with numerous partners, in science-based life cycle analyses that will be hard to translate into a simple, consumer-facing label.

Again, the good news is that while the Sustainability Consortium was started by Walmart, its partners now include Best Buy, Kroger, Safeway and Marks & Spenser as well. Provide those retailers with actionable data about sustainability, and they can then be persuaded to make smart choices on behalf of consumers. It’s easier to change a few hundred big brands than it is to change a few hundred million consumers.

As Jon put it: “It’s not going to be the consumers who drive market change. They’re going to rely on retailers and others, government agencies and NGOs, who are going to force change.”

To an impressive degree, this is what Marks & Spencer is doing with its sustainability program, Plan A. Why Plan A? Because there’s no Plan B. The retail chain is being pushed by consumers but it’s pulling them as well–for example, the stores stopping giving away plastic bags, instead charging 5p per bag, and dropped its plastic bad use by 83%. M & S used to give away more than 460 million carrier bags a year. In M&S’s cafes, consumers need not worry about the coffee–every blend is Fair Trade, organic and Rainforest Alliance Certified.

Still, in the end, the consumer is king. M&S sources as much food as possible — including all of its fresh beef, pork, chicken, turkey, duck, goose, farmed salmon and trout, shell eggs and milk — from the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The store has even worked with farmers to extend the UK growing season for asparagus.

Still, there are limits to what a company can do. Paula Crossfield of Civil Eats asked Louise Nicholls about reports that asparagus farming in Peru is causing severe water problems there. (See How Peru’s wells are being sucked dry by British love of asparagus.) That sure doesn’t sound sustainable.

So why not stop selling asparagus in the winter? That, evidently, is a step too far, even for M&S. Business is business. And so the dance continues,

Who says environmentalists are all gloom and doom? In terms of sheer fun, the 2011 edition of Brainstorm Green, FORTUNE’s conference about business and the environment, topped them all.

Chuck Leavell at Brainstorm Green

Along with  earnest talk about climate policy, nuclear power, investing in green and electric cars, there were early morning surfing lessons from Laird Hamilton, spectacular images from National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, fabulous sustainable food from star chefs (including Rick Moonen of rmSeafood and Michel Nischan of Wholesome Wave) and even dancing to the music of a band put together by Chuck Leavell, the keyboardist for the Rolling Stones, tree farmer extraordinaire, author of a new book (Growing a Better America) and all-around good guy.

What we all learned can’t be condensed into one blog post, but here are a few of my notes and quotes from our jam-packed 48 hours in Laguna Beach:

The future of coal: Lively debate here, with Michael Morris, the straight-talking CEO of coal-burning utility American Electric Power saying that without new government policy, coal will continue to be burned in massive quantities, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

“China, India, Indonesia, Australia, Russia, they’re all building coal plants. And they will continue to build coal plants,” Morris said.

As for the long-planned efforts to capture and store CO2 from coal plants to make them cleaner, much of it funded with your tax dollars, Morris said: “The capture works. The storage works. But it’s not inexpensive.” So absent a price on carbon emissions, why would anyone do it, he was asked. “They won’t,” he replied.

Alan Salzman, ceo of Vantage Point  Venture Partners, took a more optimistic view. His firm invested in Brightsource Energy, which is building a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert.

“It’s as big as any power plant, coal, nuclear or anything else,” he said.

The cost of renewable energy will drop faster than most people think, Salzman said: “People tend to look backward and take a static view.” Plasma TVs cost $12,000 not long ago, he noted, and now they are on sale at Costco.

Meanwhile, opposition to coal plants will only grow.

“Coal,” Salzman declared, sounding like the Sierra club’s Mike Brune, “is the new tobacco.”

Walmart’s culture change: Walmart’s ambitious sustainability efforts have paid off in many ways, some unexpected, said Leslie Dach, the company’s executive vp.  They’ve helped the company save lots of money. They’ve driven sales of environmentally-preferable products, like CFL bulbs. They’ve dramatically improved Walmart’s reputation, making it easier for the company to enter new markets and attract employees.

Leslie Dach

Maybe most important, though, is the fact that the sustainability work has changed the way Walmart thinks about itself.  “It’s really been transformative inside in helping us take a broader look at our role in the world,” Dach said. Before, he said,  “we weren’t meeting the world’s expectations of us.” Now, the company takes an expansive view of its impact and responsibility on a range of issues—from climate change to health care to agriculture to working conditions in China. It’s far from perfect but, as Dach put it, “that’s a different corporate culture than the company ever had.”

Facebook, Twitter and radical transparency:  News, information and opinion spread faster than ever, secrets are fewer, cameras are everywhere and all of that creates risks and opportunities for business, said Aron Cramer, the president and ceo of BSR and author of Sustainable Excellence.

To be sure, businesses have had to communicate and react to what’s being said about them since the muckracker days but the pace of activity has quickened, to say the least. “Yes, we had revolutions before we had social media, but we had travel before we had airplanes,” Aron said. “These changes have huge impact for business.”

Smart companies see ways to turn transparency to their advantage. Ben Packard, the vice president for global responsibility at Starbucks, talked about how the company had crowdsourced its approach to a thorny problem—how to make a recyclable hot cup. Starbucks admitted it didn’t have a solution, and invited suppliers, competitors,  recycling experts and government officials to help devise one. It seems to be working, Ben said.

AT&T has an all-but-uncensored Facebook page, filled on many days with complaints. “The telecom industry is one of the most talked-about industries in social media, and it’s not all unicorns and rainbows,” said Charlene Lake, senior vice president of public affairs and chief sustainability officer.

But rapid, unfiltered access to what customers are saying is valuable. Executives get early warnings of problems that may arise. The company has an opportunity to resolve complaints, and correct misinformation. Nearly 40 people work on AT&T’s  Facebook page, Charlene said, and she checks in regularly, for better or worse.

“It’s painful when the negative posts are wrong,” she said. “And it’s painful when they are right.”

Brainstorm Green 2012: The powers that be at FORTUNE tell me that we’re going to stage the conference again next year. I’m delighted. It was great to see so many old friends and meet some ones. I had an email today from a friend who wrote: “It feels more like a gathering or ‘family reunion’ than just a conference.” I can’t think of a better compliment, and  I look forward to joining many of you again a year from now.

It’s been another action-packed day at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment. Lively conversation about the future of coal (it’s not going away), sustainable seafood (about which more another day), geoengineering and marketing to the green consumer.

The “green consumer” panel featured SC Johnson’s CEO H. Fisk Johnson, Steve Wenc of UL Environment and marketing guru Suzanne Shelton. It was moderated by my friend and colleague Joel Makower, the founder and editor-in-chief of GreenBiz. They all agreed that much of corporate America has moved ahead of its customers when it comes to embracing green products.

Wait, it gets worse: Joel and Suzanne argued that consumers fool themselves about their green behavior. They buy a CFL bulb or green cleaning product or perhaps a Prius and then decide they’ve done their part for the planet. They tell pollsters that they consider sustainability factors in their purchasing decisions and describe themselves as “conscious consumers” but the reality is quite different. They’re greenwashing their own behavior, Joel noted.

Is this bottle necessary?

Fisk told a story that illustrates this sometimes-depressing reality. SCJ has come up with a concentrated form of Windex that it sells in a small plastic pouch.  Customers can snip off the top of the pouch, pour  it into a refillable bottle and add water to get the equivalent of a 32-ounce bottle of Windex. The company saves money on packaging and energy, less carbon is emitted into the environment, less waste goes to landfill and a few pennies of savings can be passed along to the consumer. Everyone wins.

Everyone, that is, is the developing world where this Windex concentrate is sold. It’s not sold in the U.S., Fisk said, because Americans don’t care about saving a few pennies and they don’t want to deal with the inconvenience of mixing a small package of concentrate with water. They won’t make a small change that has a significant impact.

Aside from being lazy, consumers tend to be confused and habitual. They are confused by a plethora of eco-labels and competing claims.

“They consumer still does not understand what is green and what is not,” Fisk said.

Shoppers rely on the labels on products for information about sustainability, but they don’t trust the companies that make them, Suzanne said. They don’t have the time, the energy, the desire or focus to think about the consequences of their purchasing decisions.

“We just grab the same stuff off the shelf that we always grab off the shelf,” Suzanne said. “Where’s the moment where we can shift from automatic behavior to conscious choice?”

Discouraged by all this? Don’t be. Habitually modest but seriously green companies like SCJ are starting to talk more about their sustainability work. The company has to do so, Fisk said, to keep up with competitors like Clorox, Seventh Generation and Method. Better-educated consumers will be the result.

Besides that, objective guidance from third parties will help guide those consumers who care. UL Environment has begun to study consumer products. Good Guide is getting traction. The Sustainability Consortium is cranking up. All that will bring clarity to the question of which products are green. (See The Business of Rating Business.)

Finally, some very clever companies are going beyond education to reward consumers for greener behavior. Recyclebank is one. OPower is another. (See OPower, peer pressure and climate change.) Retailers like Walmart and Whole Foods are looking for ways nudge consumers towards better choices, or to make better choices for them.

In the end, it doesn’t take a majority of consumers to move a market, just a significant minority.

So remember how the song goes: The darkest hour is just before dawn.