It seems like, every week, another publication comes out with their own ranking of the “XX Most Sustainable Companies.” Superlatives aside, what do these rankings really tell us? And is it time to raise the bar?

Unlike the building industry, which has come together around the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard, for companies seeking to be classified as a sustainable enterprise, it’s still the Wild West out there. As Bob Willard, author of The Sustainable Advantage, talks about in this blog post from early April, the various methodologies used to determine a company’s sustainability are all over the map. The metrics used in making these pronouncements can vary widely, and publications range from being fairly transparent about their ranking criteria to being highly opaque, churning out sustainability pronouncements from a black box. As Willard says in his post, “The disappointing lack of consensus reinforces the importance of common, rigorous criteria so that we would know a sustainable enterprise when we saw one.”

The unfortunate by-product of this lack of consensus is that many companies who are legitimately making strides to become a sustainable enterprise are hesitant to share this information with the public for fear that the hyper-sensitive green community will then start scrutinizing their claims and uncover an area where they aren’t making the grade just yet. As GreenBiz states in their State of Green Business 2011 report, these companies are concerned about being accused of “greenwashing,” and because there is no recognized standard for what is a legitimate sustainability claim, the criteria by which a company is labeled a “greenwasher” can be just as murky as the criteria by which a company is labeled “most sustainable.”

So how do we get to that rigorous standard and advance the art of assessing the sustainability of companies? The good news is that a lot of the groundwork has been laid to get us there, and the corporate world is ready for this kind of a standard.

Before establishing any standard, we need to know the criteria by which we are to assess. Willard suggests that we start with The Natural Step framework, and we at iSpring think that’s a good starting point, too. The Natural Step brings scientific consensus to the conditions necessary for a sustainable society. In a nutshell, the framework defines a sustainable enterprise as one that neutralizes its environmental and social impacts, cleans up after itself and doesn’t undermine future generations’ ability to meet their own basic needs. It’s net-zero everything. Pretty good criteria, huh?

Once the criteria are there, we can start developing the standard. There are some good ones out there already on which we can build. B Corporation, recently profiled in this New York Times article, certifies all kinds of companies according to transparent and ever-evolving environmental and social standards, and the ULE 880 Standard, due to be released soon, looks promising for manufacturers.

Regardless of which standard we choose as the foundation, it’s extrememly important that the evolved standard requires that companies achieve the sustainability moniker by reaching some agreed-upon target (derived from the original criteria) and not by simply improving from some baseline originally established by the companies being certified. That’s a bit like asking a student to determine the criteria by which he or she will receive an A in a course. As Willard says, the standard needs “to spark transformational approaches to being good companies, not incremental approaches toward being less bad.” In short, the bar needs to be set high enough so that companies don’t become complacent and believe that they’re already doing their part and there’s no urgency to do more.

It may seem like a stretch, but in reality, we’re ready for this standard. Large companies like Walmart and Procter and Gamble have already set aggressive, zero-waste goals. Forward-thinking companies are ready for it, and if history is any indicator, once the big guys do it, the smaller guys will follow suit. If we set the standard high, we’ll encourage the sort of innovative technological breakthroughs to get ourselves there. New business models will emerge–have emerged–and we’ll be well on our way. Will your company help lead the charge?