BILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES TURNING SUSTAINABILITY INTO PROFIT .

Here are now at least nine companies globally that generate a billion dollars or more in annual revenue from products or services that have sustainability or social good at their core. These so-called green giants – which include Tesla, Chipotle, Ikea, Unilever, Nike, Toyota, Brazilian beauty company Natura, Whole Foods and GE’s Ecomagination – manufacture a stunning array of products, including burritos and beauty cream, sports shoes and sports cars. In the process, they have succeeded in doing what many thought impossible: they’ve made sustainability profitable.

This year, the list will be joined by Target. The company expects its Made to Matter line of “better-for-you and better-for-the-world” products – which includes Method Home and Ella’s Kitchen organic baby food, among others – to pass the $1bn mark in 2015. Collectively these green nine – perhaps now green 10 – generate over $100bn in annual revenue from their green business lines alone. And their stock outperforms a portfolio of conventional competitors by 11.7% per year.

It’s not hard to see why so many people are surprised by the idea that a sustainable business could be profitable. In his 1970 essay, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Milton Friedman dismissed any business with a “social conscience” as “unadulterated socialism”. Since then, the notion that sustainability or social good and profit are fundamentally opposing forces has hardened into fact in the minds of most business leaders – a fact depressingly confirmed in numerous conversations I’ve had this year with sustainability professionals struggling to persuade their business colleagues of the case for change.

For years, conventional business wisdom has held that sustainability is at best a strategy to save money, through things like energy and water efficiency. More likely it will cost or lose a company money. In other words, if sustainability features on the balance sheet at all, it’s expected to be in the philanthropic category, or attached firmly to the bottom line.

But while the idea of unprofitable sustainability is widespread, it’s not actually borne out. Several green giants are growing faster than conventional business lines – including Unilever’s purpose-driven brands outstripping conventional brands within its own portfolio. Many command wider profit margins than their category averages. They are darlings of the stock market. Some are even knocking stalwarts of the strip mall and titans of industry off their long-held leadership perches. For example, Chipotle’s 2014 revenues were four times those of American icon Burger King.

Granted, Chipotle’s recent slew of food-contamination closures have tarnished the company’s halo, but all signs suggest that a company that has climbed to more than $4bn in annual revenues will be able to address this challenge and come out stronger than before.

The green giants are turning a strategy of sustainability or social good into a billion-dollar business proposition, and profiting in the process. Their success is profoundly important because it represents a fundamental shift. For the green giants, sustainability is not about how they save money, but about how they make it. They’ve shifted sustainability from the bottom to the top line – and that move has had profound implications for sustainability in the context of business. No longer are sustainability and profit at odds; on the contrary, rather than being a drag on profit, sustainability can drive it.