A recent study by G&A Institute suggests that 81 percent of all S&P 500 companies are publishing sustainability reports. To get to this point has taken roughly 20 years, mostly promoted by the community that evolved around the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), founded in 1997.

Early on in this process, the big-name brands recognized their progress would be limited without involving their suppliers. While pioneers such as Patagonia began their supply chain program as far back as the early 1990s, the likes of Walmart, Philips, Tesco, GE and Marks and Spencer’s began in the early 2000s, with the hard-to-ignore rise in the price of energy. Others, such as HP or Duke Energy, began as recently as 2012.

Read the full article by Noam Gressel (CEO and Co-founder ECO-OS)