Sigma-Aldrich® Named to "Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World" List

-- St. Louis-based Company Ranked 20th in First-Ever Appearance

ST. LOUIS, Jan. 22, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (Nasdaq: SIAL) was named today for the first time to the "Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World" list in an announcement made earlier at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  The St. Louis-based Company was ranked 20th, one of the highest rankings among its peers.

"We are excited and grateful to be named to this year's Global 100," said Rakesh Sachdev, Sigma-Aldrich President and CEO.  "In 2010, we established a number of sustainability goals we are on track to achieve by 2015.  The effort we have put forth as part of this GC1015 initiative is one of the many reasons we have made such incredible progress in becoming a more responsible corporate citizen.  We are proud of our accomplishments and the positive impact they are having on our communities, investors and employees as well as on our ability to continue providing customers the high quality products, services and solutions for which we are known."

Recognized as one of the world's most credible corporate sustainability rankings, the Global 100 consists of the 100 top-performing companies worldwide based on a range of sector-specific "sustainability" metrics.  This is the tenth year the Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based media and investment research company, has issued this list.

"The results speak for themselves," said Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights.  "Topping a well-diversified benchmark is not easy, but the Global 100 has managed to squeak out marginal out-performance across a turbulent period in the history of the capital markets.  We attribute this excess return to the growing investment relevance of core sustainability themes, including water scarcity, rising energy prices and growing competition for human capital, all of which are captured in the Global 100 methodology."

In determining who to recognize, Corporate Knights collected data from Bloomberg and through direct engagement with the 400 companies that made its shortlist.  The shortlist was chosen from global indices of mid and large cap stocks (approximately 4,000 companies). 

All companies were screened according to their sustainability disclosure practices, financial health and product types among other criteria.  The 400 shortlisted sustainability leaders were then scored, relative to their competitors, on 12 key performance indicators such as waste productivity, leadership diversity, employee turnover and others.

"Being named to the Global 100 is a great recognition of our efforts primarily because of the data driven nature of their evaluation," said Jeffrey Whitford, Global Citizenship Manager.  "We have spent the past four years developing and implementing processes to gather and validate as much sustainability data as we can on the Company, our suppliers and our vendors.  This data is integral to making informed decisions about energy investments in our facilities and to rethinking the way we operate to improve our environmental footprint."

For full rankings and other details, please visit http://global100.org/.  To learn more about Sigma-Aldrich's global citizenship efforts, visit www.sialglobalcitizenship.com.

About Sigma-Aldrich:  Sigma-Aldrich, a leading Life Science and High Technology company focused on enhancing human health and safety, manufactures and distributes more than 200,000 chemicals, biochemicals and other essential products to more than 1.4 million customers globally in research and applied labs as well as in industrial and commercial markets. With three distinct business units – Research, Applied and SAFC Commercial – Sigma-Aldrich is committed to enabling science to improve the quality of life. The Company operates in 37 countries, has more than 9,000 employees worldwide and had sales of $2.6 billion in 2012. For more information about Sigma-Aldrich, please visit its website at www.sigma-aldrich.com.

Sigma-Aldrich is a trademark of Sigma-Aldrich Co, LLC registered in the US and other countries.