There’s a whole raft of industries that are not susceptible to that kind of consumer pressure. We try to look at how can we influence these industries. So we started looking at it from an investor’s perspective. People invest in these companies—foreign investors, Chinese investors and corporate investors.

Many of the powerful domestic corporations were listed on the Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets. If investors were aware that some had received environmental citations, would that affect their investment decisions? Ma believed it was worth a try. If institutional funds began to rely on the IPE database in making investment judgments, then steel, energy, mining and electric power companies might become more environmentally responsible.IPE led the Green Choice Alliance members in launching a new initiative, Green Stocks.

Green Stocks focused first on the cement industry; IPE’s experience with IT and textiles had shown that highlighting a single industry was effective. China was the world’s largest producer and consumer of cement. The country produced half the world’s annual cement supply, and in the preceding three years it had used more cement than the US had during the entire 20 ^th century. Cement production was an energy-intensive and dirty industry. It created 30 percent of the country’s dust emissions, as well as a good proportion of its greenhouse gases, contributing to the choking levels of smog and fine particulate matter. As a major coal-burner, the cement industry accounted for 14 percent of mercury released into the air. Green stocks. On June 18, 2013, after two years of development, IPE introduced, in partnership with several other NGOs, Phase I of its Green Stocks initiative. As with the supply-chain initiative, IPE hoped to link Chinese companies that had violated environmental rules to their largest (often foreign) customers—only this time the customers were institutional investors, rather than big consumer brands. Collins explains: “I think what we’re seeing changing is some of the pension funds, particularly, are more susceptible to public pressure, because they’re investing public money in these kind of schemes.”

The IPE database, and a report coinciding with the Green Stocks launch, identified 17 listed cement companies (or their subsidiaries) that were frequent violators of discharge regulations. ^[30] IPE researchers contacted the 17 companies and followed up with non-respondents. Only one company put forth a plan of action. The response from China National Building Materials Group Corporation was more typical: “If you have not received a reply to your letter it is probably because the company felt the contents of the letter were of no interest.”

IPE and its NGO partners then contacted domestic and foreign institutional investors with holdings in the 17 companies. Overall, the response was disappointing. While some foreign funds said they would conduct follow-up investigations, most investors, like the violating companies themselves, offered no response at all. A large Chinese mutual fund replied, “The investment services provided by the fund to its client has only one goal and that is to make a profit for the client.”

But Ma and his colleagues were not deterred; they expected the process to take time. After all, the green supply-chain initiative had started slowly in 2007, with a discouraging initial response from companies. Yet by mid-2013, when IPE launched Green Stocks, over 950 MNCs and their suppliers had explained their environmental violations and described corrective actions taken. The Alliance partners would have to keep pushing. Meanwhile, IPE started gearing up for another stab at the financial industry. In an initiative it called Green Banking, it would aim to influence banks to stop giving credit to companies with environmental violations.

What else could be done to pressure the biggest polluters? Ma and his colleagues had already started to pursue yet another angle. They had launched an initiative that took advantage of the public’s blossoming interest in real-time data, sparked by the US Embassy Twitter feed, and the growing demand for government transparency.