  The largest 6,529 international corporations are accountable for almost 30%
of global CO2e emissions. A growing awareness of the role of the corporate
world in the path toward sustainability has led many shareholders and
stakeholders to pursue increasingly stringent and ambitious environmental
goals. However, how to assess the corporate environmental performance
objectively and efficiently remains an open question. This study reveals
underlying dynamics and structures that can be used to construct a unified
quantitative picture of the environmental impact of companies. This study shows
that the environmental impact (metabolism) of companies CO2e energy used, water
withdrawal and waste production, scales with their size according to a simple
power law which is often sublinear, and can be used to derive a
sector-specific, size-dependent benchmark to asses unambiguously a company's
environmental performance. Enforcing such a benchmark would potentially result
in a 15% emissions reduction, but a fair and effective environmental policy
should consider the size of the corporation and the super or sublinear nature
of the scaling relationship
