Companies must now demonstrate they are being run responsibly and have adopted policies to address environmental issues.

More and more people want to know about the provenance of foods they purchase, labour practices, whether products are tested on animals, if the manufacturing process contaminates the local rivers and so on.

One place to find out if a company is environmentally-friendly is to look at a company’s report and accounts to see if it articulates a policy.

One might think that a company such as Royal Dutch Shell, which extracts fossil fuels, is not environmentally-friendly. 

But the question is more nuanced than it appears at first sight. For example, Shell is investing in a network of electric charging stations, so one needs to think about how to quantify this into the equation.

It has also introduced a policy whereby any project producing more than 50,000 tonnes of greenhouse gasses per year must have an energy plan in place. This resulted in a project in Malaysia using solar panels as a source of energy supply and a plant in Qatar using a fuel byproduct to power the plant.

The debate extends to less obvious companies. For example, one might think that Tesco (TSCO) has a large carbon ‘footprint’ due to its large numbers of energy sapping stores and food waste. However, it built the UK’s first 100% carbon ‘positive’ store, which recycles rain water, utilises low power light emitting diode (LED) lights and is powered by solar panels.

BENEFITING FROM THE GREEN SCENE

Many businesses are benefiting from the shift to green investing, and range in activity from solar, lighting, packaging, and even, perhaps counter-intuitively, component suppliers to car manufacturers.

One example is Infineon, an electronics supplier to the global car industry. Its components help cars become more efficient and promote safety. In addition, the rapid move towards electric and hybrid vehicles is a potential bonanza.

A car run on fossil fuels contains around £230 worth of electronic components while an electric car has £700 pounds worth of electronics, a boon for suppliers like Infineon as the market moves towards electric vehicles.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES

Some listed companies have explicit environmental policies on their websites such as Next (NXT). The retailer aims to reduce energy used, cut back on carbon dioxide, increase energy efficiency and reduce waste by doing more recycling.

Last year, despite increasing floor space, Next reduced its carbon dioxide output by 14% and recycled 95% of waste, which otherwise would have gone into landfill. The company has installed smart building management systems in 97% of its buildings to increase efficiency and reduce usage. It has installed LED lighting and solar panels. Next has also set a target of producing 100% of renewable electricity by 2030.

Another good example is consumer goods giant Unilever (ULVR). Owning iconic brands such as Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever touches a lot of areas which impact the environment from manufacturing plants to packaging.

It has produced a blueprint for what it calls sustainable living, which is the cornerstone of its business activities. It defines sustainability as creating a world where everyone can live well within the natural limits of the planet.

A key pillar of the policy is reducing costs and using key resources more intelligently. Over the last 10 years, Unilever claims it has avoided energy costs in its factories equivalent to saving €490m, while using fewer raw materials and in turn resulting in less waste has saved the company over €260m. The company has lowered water usage through innovations such as low rinse laundry products.

FOUR STOCKS INVOLVED IN RECYCLING

Pennon (PNN)

Although best known as a water company, half of its business is in waste management and recycling, through subsidiary Viridor. It has 800 waste collection trucks and operates eight energy recovery centres. It produces enough power to keep the lights on in over 400,000 homes.

Biffa (BIFF)

Biffa is engaged in collection, treatment, processing and disposal of waste and recyclable materials, as well as turning waste into energy to sell back to the grid. It operates the UK’s largest commercial and industrial waste processing business as well as collecting waste from local councils.

DS Smith (SMDS)

The company is a supplier of corrugated packaging in Europe and plastics across the world. Its packaging is used to transport food, beverages, chemicals and pharmaceuticals among other items. The company boasts that its paper mill in Kent is capable of recycling over 2.5bn coffee cups every year.

Smurfit Kappa (SKG)

A global packaging business with 350 production sites across the globe, Smurfit Kappa has strong credentials as a green company. It replaces all the natural resources used to make its boxes by replanting trees and Smurfit also uses 75% of recycled fibres in its products. The company operates a ‘chain of custody’ whereby it verifies the traceability of suppliers.

TAP INTO FUND MANAGERS’ SCREENING SKILLS

Unfortunately not all companies are this good at communicating their environmental practices; some don’t have a policy at all. That’s why it can pay to use the services of a fund manager when seeking to make investments explicitly linked to good environmental practices.

These fund managers will either have their own screening techniques or they employ a third party specialist to do the hard work.

Liontrust has a three stage approach to its investment process when it comes to constructing its sustainable portfolios. It screens for companies which it considers are negatively impacting the environment, such as miners, airlines, and oil and gas companies. It explicitly excludes investing in companies which have more than 5% of revenues involved in any form of fossil fuel extraction.

The second screening process is more about which companies to include and it has an interesting take on the environmental issue. It believes that the climate change challenge is providing good growth opportunities for some companies, at the expense of incumbents.

It believes investing in companies that are focused on providing solutions to environmental issues is the best way forward, both for a cleaner planet and its investors’ returns.

Finally, the team engage with investee company managements to encourage greater responsibility and to move towards a greener future. The screening process reduces the potential universe of investment candidates in half, but still plenty big enough to construct diversified portfolios.

DIGGING DEEPER WHEN SCREENING

Edentree Investment Management runs one of the oldest socially responsible funds, Amity UK Fund (0937175), which launched in 1988. It too starts its process by employing a negative screen and a positive screen to whittle down the available universe. As one might expect, it excludes companies involved in tobacco, alcohol, gaming, armaments and mining.

It also excludes companies doing business in countries with poor human rights records. It claims that it checks firms’ supply chains and fair trade practices as well as the provenance of raw materials.

It outsources some of the heavy lifting to a company called Sustainalytics, which is a leading ESG and corporate governance provider. It measures companies on a number of metrics to come up with a rating on over 11,000 companies worldwide.

The positive screening aims to identify companies with strong green credentials and then conducts individual research on what it believes are the best companies.

A GROWING MARKET

Asset manager Impax takes a different approach, aiming to give its investors exposure to profitable companies which have material revenues from fast growing environmental markets.

It offers a number of funds and strategies including investment trust Impax Environmental Markets (IEM) which is focused on benefiting from long term themes, such as growing populations, increasing urbanisation and depletion of natural resources.

It invests in small and mid-cap companies which have more than half of their revenues generated by sales of environmental products.

Elsewhere, there are a number of specialist investment trusts which give investors exposure to renewable energy and the environment. For example, John Laing Environmental Assets (JLEN) invests in a portfolio of operational environmental infrastructure projects. Its portfolio includes onshore wind, solar and waste and wastewater processing projects in the UK.

There are also a number of exchange-traded funds which provide exposure to the environmental theme such as iShares Global Clean Energy UCITS ETF (INRG).

INVESTORS CAN REAP HIGHER RETURNS

One upshot of all these trends is the appearance   of a new zeitgeist (‘spirit of the age’). A few years ago it was assumed that investing in ESG would lead to inferior investment returns, but that didn’t matter because the primary purpose was to ‘take the moral high ground’. Today that is not the case.

In fact, due to the weight of money now dedicated to ESG, the chances are that companies considered to be ‘green’ are more likely to outperform.

A report by BNP Paribas highlighted empirical data suggesting that strong performance on ESG measures improved corporate financial performance and investment returns.

But, as far as many of the next generation of investors are concerned, the profit motive is not important when compared to wider issues like climate change, as the Extinction Rebellion protests showed. Younger people care about companies behaving responsibly and doing the right thing.

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