Corporate Knights, the company for clean capitalism, announced its eighth annual Global 100 list of the most sustainable large corporations in the world.

Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights, says, “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.” 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%.

The Global 100 was recently recognized for its industry-leading standard of transparency and objectivity by a meta-study of corporate sustainability rankings (Rate the Raters by the consultancy SustainAbility).

The number one ranked company in the Global 100 the world for 2012 was Novo Nordisk. The Danish pharmaceutical firm, which had revenues of DKK 60.7 billion (US$10.5 billion) in 2010, 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.

The 2012 Global 100 tapped intelligence from the world's largest sustainability research alliance put together by Legg Mason’s Global Currents Investment Management and Phoenix Global Advisors LLC to isolate the top ten per cent of companies from a universe of 3,500 global stocks, which were then transparently ranked based on 11 indicators, with data collected by Corporate Knights Research Group and verified with The BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL® service.

The Global 100 includes companies from 22 countries encompassing all sectors of the economy, with collective annual sales in excess of $3.02 trillion, and 5,285,645 million employees.