ABSTRACT
In earlier chapters the activities of a range of banks were explored. Various examples were given and many were taken from smaller banks such as Triodos Bank and The Co-operative Bank. Within mainstream banking, the same few banks were often referred to, such as UBS, ING, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America. These are clearly the banks most active and accessible in the field of sustainable banking (accessible in that information about them exists because they themselves publish environmental reports or are covered by other studies). Since the preceding chapters focused on the actions of individual banks in particular cases, an incomplete picture has been created in which the context in which environmental activities within a bank take place is not clear, nor is it clear to what extent environmental care has permeated throughout the whole banking sector. This chapter rectifies that by looking closely at the environmental activities of a number of banks selected for an a priori unrelated criterion: the scale of their banking activities. A set of environmental activities has been defined and each bank in the study is assessed for its performance in those activities.
