Welcome to The Sunday Times Green List 2008, our first competition to find companies that are striving to improve their environmental performance.

We launched this venture to reflect the changing mood in the business world. Today it is not enough simply to make a profit for shareholders. Companies have a wider responsibility to ensure that they minimise the environmental impact of what they do. Consumers, clients and peers expect it.

The 50 companies listed in this report are all pioneers — enterprising, enlightened and fizzing with new ideas. They vary from Greencare H2O, a business employing just 50 people distributing watercoolers, to the banking giant HBOS, which has a staff of 74,000.

All have a common sense of purpose about their corporate social responsibility.

Our Best Green Companies venture is unique. There may be plenty of environmental awards but this is the first that has both a robust methodology to measure environmental performance and a survey of each company’s staff to find out whether the green sheen is more than skin-deep.

Although 88 organisations registered for the competition, a number fell by the wayside. So be it. When we launched Best Companies to Work For eight years ago there was similar hesitation at the idea of asking staff what they thought of management and then publishing the results in a newspaper. It is Britain’s biggest national survey of employee satisfaction today.

I have no doubt that hundreds of firms will read our first report and will be clamouring for a place on our Green List 2009.

I am grateful to our research partners Bureau Veritas and Munro Global for their hard work in co-producing our survey, and I thank our sponsors Eon and Bank of Scotland Corporate for recognising the value of this venture.

RICHARD CASEBY

Managing Editor

The Sunday Times