Welcome to The Sunday Times Green List 2009, our annual competition to find companies that are striving to improve their environmental performance.

We launched this venture last year to reflect the changing mood in the business world. Today it is not enough simply to turn a profit. 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 our first report in 2008 were all pioneers - enterprising, enlightened and fizzing with new ideas. They varied from Carillion, a construction company employing 40,000 people, which is on track to halve its carbon emissions by 2010, to JC Atkinson and Son, a firm with 70 employees which manufactures 60,000 coffins a year and supplies its own electricity from a biomass generator.

Other winners included Eurostar, the high-speed train operator, Co-operative Financial Services, Canon (UK), the electronic specialist, and Pfizer Global Research and Development.

All our Best Green companies share a common sense of purpose about their corporate social responsibility, even in these most challenging economic times.

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.

This year we have listened to those in the retail sector who are making special efforts to improve the environmental impact of their supply chain. We have adapted the methodology to take account of these factors.

Although 88 organisations registered for the competition 2008, a number fell by the wayside. So be it. When we launched Best Companies to Work For nine 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. Today it is Britain's biggest national survey of employee satisfaction.

Hundreds of firms read our first report and clamoured for more information about how to take part. Now is their chance to step up to the plate for 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 sponsor Lloyds TSB for recognising the value of this venture.

RICHARD CASEBY
Managing Editor
The Sunday Times