Bank of Hawaii only isle firm on U.S. most-sustainable list

Bank of Hawaii has been ranked fourth among U.S. financial institutions and 40th overall in the 2019 “100 Most Sustainable Companies list,” published Friday by Barron’s magazine. Bank of Hawaii is the only company in Hawaii to be recognized.

“It is an honor to be recognized as a Most Sustainable Company in the nation,” Bank of Hawaii chairman, president and CEO Peter Ho said in a statement. “As a company in the Pacific islands, we have a great responsibility to incorporate sustainable practices in everything we do. This acknowledgment is a reflection of the great job our employees are doing — from financing renewable energy projects, reducing paper through our digital transformation effort and increasing the use of photovoltaic solar panels on branches/locations to converting to energy-efficiency features and volunteering for community projects that directly impact the environment.”

To determine the ranking, Barron’s partnered with Calvert Research and Management and analyzed the 1,000 largest publicly held U.S. companies (by stock market value) and scored them on more than 200 key indicators and 28 issues on environmental, social and corporate governance factors. Calvert then sorted the data into five key categories: shareholders, employees, customers, planet and community. The shareholders category included items like board structure and accounting policies; employees: workplace diversity and labor relations; customers: business ethics and product safety; planet: greenhouse-gas emissions; and community: community engagement and human rights along the supply chain.