The Roberts Environmental Center analyzes the environmental and social reporting of the world’s largest companies and publishes the results of up to 30 companies at a time in industrial sector reports. We rank the companies for overall quality of reporting and assign letter grades. Prior to final publication the companies are given an opportunity to point out any omissions or misunderstandings on the part of the Center’s analysts, and to post additional material to their web sites for re-analysis prior to assigning the final letter grades. Many companies take advantage of this opportunity. The following are the summaries of the reports published on January 8, 2007: Pharmaceuticals, Food Services, Entertainment, Railroads, and Consumer Foods.

2007 Pharmaceuticals Sector

Sanofi-Aventis (France) and Novartis (Switzerland) get grades of A+.

Pfizer (US), Bristol-Myers Squibb (US), Abbott Laboratories (US), and GlaxoSmithKline (UK) round out the A list. Six additional American firms received grades of B.

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2007 Food Services Sector

McDonalds (US) gets and A+, closely followed by Starbucks (A).

Jack in the Box (US), Sodexho Alliance (France), Wendys International (US) and Darden Restaurants (US) get grades of B.

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2007 Consumer Food, Food Production, and Beverages Sectors

Groupe Danone (France) gets the only A grade.

Compared to its reporting the next closest firms: PepsiCo (US), Unilever (UK), Nestle (Switzerland), Tyson Foods (US), Anheuser-Busch (US), Inbev (Belgium), and Coca Cola (US), all got grades of B.

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2007 Entertainment Sector

Time Warner (US) gets an A+, followed by Walt Disney (US) with an A-.

No other firm came close, with only Clear Channel Communications (US) and Viacom (US) getting only Cs.

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2007 Railroads Sector

Four of the six railroads in this sector–East Japan Railway, CSX (US), Deutsche Bahn (Germany), and Burlington Northern Santa Fe (US) received grades of A.

Union Pacific (US) and SNCF (France) received Bs. Even the best scores, however, were about half of those found in other sectors.