This year, TIME editors launch the TIME100 Companies: Industry Leaders lists, an expansion of the TIME100 Most Influential Companies issue that dives deeper into 20 sectors to look at the companies shaping their industries. These are the 10 most influential companies in sustainability of 2026.

GHGSat

Methane monitor
Governments and the private sector can make all the pledges they want about curbing their  planet-warming emissions, but without a way to measure compliance, those promises are empty. Enter GHGSat, a Montreal-based company that has 15 satellites in orbit scanning the surface of the Earth for sources of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. There are other satellites that do what GHGSat is doing, but none as well. GHGSat can zoom in on a sprawling refinery or other facility and pinpoint the precise loading dock or pipe array where the emission originates, allowing technicians to quickly deploy solutions to shut down the leak. “If we told you that the problem is in something the size of a baseball stadium or an airport, that's not super helpful,” says Deepak Anand, the company’s chief commercial officer. “If I can tell you, no, no, it's at this gate, or it's at this cargo bay, you can actually take care of it.” The fossil fuel industry is taking notice. In 2025, GHGSat inked new methane monitoring partnerships with major oil and gas firms including ExxonMobil, Aramco, and Brazil’s Petrobras, as well as the U.K. Space Agency. —Jeffrey Kluger

Watershed

Corporate sustainability champion

When the Trump Administration announced last year that it would stop updating a key database that companies use to calculate their supply chain emissions, corporate sustainability data services provider Watershed stepped in, creating a free alternative available to companies. The program, called Cornerstone and launched in partnership with Stanford University in August, helps companies calculate their emissions based on their economic activities—just as the Environmental Protection Agency’s program did. 

A free data platform may seem like an unusual bet for a firm that sells software to help companies understand their climate impact, but co-founder Taylor Francis insists replacing EPA data helps keep the broader sustainability infrastructure intact, which is crucial to the company’s prospects. "We will succeed if corporate sustainability succeeds,” Francis says. And as companies face new and evolving requirements to report their climate-causing emissions in places like the European Union and California, Watershed is poised to help further. —Justin Worland

Blueland

Curbing microplastics

As consumer concern around microplastics grows, Blueland has made a name for itself by eschewing single-use plastic packaging for its eco-friendly cleaning products, which include detergents, spray cleaners, and hand soaps. Instead it favors refillable dispensers and compostable paper, and tablets of dishwasher and laundry detergent that don’t use the polymer pouches found on big-brand pods. Early to market, the company has logged $300 million in sales since its start in 2019, and says it has prevented more than 1 billion single-use plastic bottles from ending up in landfills and oceans. Its success predates—and possibly inspired—some of the big brands’ similar green offerings. “I think it's questioning the things that have just become habits in our lives, wondering if there’s a better way for me to be doing these things I've been doing forever,” says CEO and co-founder Sarah Paiji Yoo. Blueland grew its revenue by 80% in 2025 and expanded its broad retail distribution into Target stores. —Don Steinberg 

Nuton

More sustainable copper

Smartphones, laptops, EVs: Much of modern technology relies on copper. “The properties of copper are important for anything that runs on electricity, and the world runs on electricity,” says Cecilia Perla, vice president of growth and sustainability and acting CEO of Nuton, a Rio Tinto subsidiary that has devised a way to access more copper more efficiently and sustainably. In its processing plants, Nuton’s proprietary additives and cultivated microorganisms accelerate and amplify the separation of valuable copper from the rest of the ore, eliminating the need for smelting and refining. Compared to conventional copper-processing methods that extract only 15% to 30% of the copper in ore, Nuton says it recovers up to 85% of the copper—and in the process uses up to 80% less water and achieves up to 60% lower carbon emissions. “Nuton produces not only more copper but better copper,” Perla says. In January, one month after its initial production, Nuton signed on its first customer, Amazon Web Services, to provide copper for the company’s U.S. data centers. —Novid Parsi

Danone

Making dairy more sustainable

Yogurt may be a healthy dietary choice. But making it? Too often, not healthy for the planet. Dairy cattle account for about 8% of human-caused methane emissions, mainly through cow burps and manure. “We have a clear mission: to provide healthy food to as many people as possible,” says Nathalie Alquier, chief sustainability officer of Danone, the world’s largest yogurt maker. In line with that mission, Danone announced in 2023 it would reduce its methane emissions 30% by 2030—and nearly achieved that goal at the end of last year. The Paris-based company, which operates in more than 120 countries, drives sustainability in partnership with its more than 60,000 dairy-farmer suppliers around the world. For instance, Danone equipped 6,500 small dairy farmers with biodigesters that turn livestock waste into renewable biogas and organic fertilizer. “We believe in collective action because we know that, in this battle, the more who join the better,” Alquier says. In 2025, Danone became the world’s largest B Corporation, and for the past five years, it has received CDP’s highest environmental score (Triple A), given to less than one-tenth of 1% of companies. —Novid Parsi

Professional Association of Diving Instructors

Turning divers into stewards

At a moment when reef systems are under mounting stress, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) is helping redefine dive tourism—not just as seeing the ocean, but safeguarding it. The world’s largest scuba-diving organization, which has issued more than 31 million certifications since 1966 and trains roughly three-quarters of the world’s divers, is using its global network as a force for change. Through its Conservation Action Portal—a digital platform designed for divers, professionals, and dive centers to track conservation efforts—as well as marine-debris cleanups, reef surveys, and a new Global Shark & Ray Census launching in June, divers are feeding real-world observations into datasets that inform research and policy. PADI says these efforts have already helped remove more than 2.6 million pieces of debris, freed 44,062 entangled animals, contributed evidence supporting a plastic bag ban in Vanuatu, and shaped single-use plastic policies in Sydney Harbour. The organization is also working directly with destinations, including in Fiji, Thailand, and Greece, to advise on dive tourism developments. “The goal is to provide action to back up hope,” says Drew Richardson, CEO and president of PADI. —Ashlea Halpern

Xylem

Saving water

Thanks to aging infrastructure, up to 60% of treated water can sometimes be lost before it even makes it to customers' faucets. Xylem helps utilities preserve this stressed resource by developing digital monitoring systems that detect leaks, and solutions to disinfect and reuse wastewater. Since 2019, the company says its projects have collectively saved 3.7 billion cubic meters of water and enabled the reuse of 18 billion cubic meters—enough to supply water to 350 million people annually. 

Recently, Xylem’s work has grabbed the attention of data center developers. As part of Amazon’s “goal of returning more water to communities than it uses in its data centers,” in 2025 the tech giant helped fund the deployment of Xylem’s real-time water monitoring software platform, Xylem Vue, in Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico. Those projects are expected to save more than 1.3 billion liters of water each year. Xylem is also working with data centers to reuse wastewater for cooling, and says using closed-loop systems can help reduce freshwater use in data centers by up to 70%. —Aimee Rawlins

Veolia

Cleaning up PFAS

One of the world's largest water services companies is removing the "forever" from "forever chemicals." Toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), linked to cancers and other illnesses, linger in the environment and can accumulate in the body. In 2025, French firm Veolia flexed its global leadership in PFAS treatment by opening a massive plant in Delaware that filters PFAS from water and incinerates it to break the bond between fluorine and carbon, one of the strongest in chemistry. The plant filters 30 million gallons per day, delivering cleaner drinking water to more than 100,000 residents. 

Now the company, which treated more than 7.6 billion cubic meters of water last year, is on track to have more than 100 PFAS water treatment sites across the U.S. in the coming years. “You need everyone around the table,” Veolia’s deputy CEO Emmanuelle Menning says. “We need regulation to be implemented, to be followed. We need investments in R&D. Private companies are part of the solution.” Growing public concern about PFAS creates opportunity: Veolia is targeting €1 billion ($1.16 billion) in revenue from mitigating micropollutants by 2030. —Don Steinberg

Overstory

Innovative wildfire prevention

When power lines spark a blaze, the consequences can be catastrophic. Overstory is helping six of North America’s 10 largest utilities prevent fires by using satellite imagery and AI to identify trees that threaten power lines. In 2025, the Amsterdam-based company, which also has projects in Latin America and New Zealand, introduced a new fuel detection model that analyzes both vegetation type and density to better understand how fires might behave once they’ve started. In California—where PG&E's parent company in January reached a $100 million settlement with shareholders who alleged the utility misrepresented its wildfire safety practices, including vegetation management around power lines, ahead of devastating wildfires—Overstory now covers PG&E’s entire 100,000-mile territory. CEO Fiona Spruill says more utilities are turning to Overstory as climate change intensifies. "They're seeing the forest change in ways they haven't for decades," Spruill says. "And so the past ways of doing things—which were [often] based on human memory or visiting a certain part of the network once every seven years—just don't work as well anymore.” —Aimee Rawlins

Circ

Textile recycling at scale

An estimated 100 billion garments are made each year—and only 1% of used clothing gets recycled. Most clothes are made from polycotton blends; historically, it’s been difficult to separate the polyester from the cotton in order to recycle. Circ developed a way to separate these materials so they can be reused, and the company is scaling quickly. In 2025, it inked partnerships with 13 major brands including H&M, Zara, and Christian Siriano, all of which incorporated Circ-recycled textiles into their products. By working with existing partners along supply chains, Circ makes it easier for brands to adopt recycled materials, says CEO Peter Majeranowski. What’s next? Circ plans to build the world's first commercial-scale polycotton recycling factory in France. "Our vision is to do what happened in the ’90s and early 2000s with paper, but with clothing," says Majeranowski. "In those two decades, the paper industry was able to build out about 130 million tons of paper recycling capacity, including the infrastructure to collect and aggregate. We want to do the same." —Aimee Rawlins

Correction, April 30

The original version of this story misstated the year Blueland launched. It was 2019, not 2014.