How should a green shopper approach the Fortune 500? "You have to ask hard questions," says Elizabeth Sturcken, an Environmental Defense managing director who worked on corporate partnerships with FedEx and UPS. "What is the company actually committing to? Do their goals address their impacts?" Several organizations can help you with this homework. Climate Counts (climatecounts.org), for instance, scores companies on their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint. And the Global Reporting Initiative (globalreporting.org) makes it easy for anyone to rate the hefty "sustainability reports" many of the world's largest corporations produce each year. Tip: See if a company commits itself to absolute goals rather than percentage improvements; a 20 percent annual reduction in pollution means less if a company grows by that much or more each year. General Electric, for example, pledged to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by one percent in absolute terms by 2012, no matter how much the company grows during the same period. It made a squishier commitment to reduce its "carbon intensity"-emissions per unit of economic output-by 30 percent by 2008.
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