Wal-Mart: Green, greener or greenwashing?

Each week, one of every three people in America visits a US Wal-Mart store translating into 100 million customers every seven days, and that’s just in the US. Sam Walton’s founding philosophy that selling products cheap in volume equals a money making dynasty is hard to deny.

While the mega store wasn’t founded on sustainable principles, other than sustaining the Walton’s, the corporation responsible for moving over 300 billion dollars worth of merchandise in 2007 continues to announce green initiatives that are standing up to scrutiny.

Most recently, in an unusual display of transparency, Wal-Mart announced an energy and emissions tracking initiative along the supply chain of seven product categories: beer, DVDs, milk, soap, soda, toothpaste and vacuum cleaners. The move is part of a new partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an independent not-for-profit organization.

In Wal-Mart’s Newest Green Goal: Cleaner Supply Chains, ClimateBiz reported that

“The partnership between CDP and Wal-Mart is a significant milestone in corporate action to mitigate climate change,” said CDP Chief Executive Paul Dickinson. “By engaging its supply chain in the CDP process, Wal-Mart will encourage its suppliers to measure and manage their greenhouse gas emissions, and ultimately reduce the total carbon footprint of Wal-Mart’s indirect emissions. We look forward to other global corporations following Wal-Mart’s lead and partnering with CDP.”

At yesterday’s Wal-Mart’s Live Better Sustainability Summit exhibitors included eco-heavyweights like Biomimicry Guild, Alliance to Save Energy, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC/Cradle to Cradle), Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), TransFair and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) among others.

I watched the Live Better Sustainability Video and it reinforced my ongoing feeling about Wal-Mart’s new “green lens”. Environmental issues are permeating the world of consumer goods, meaning consumers are making choices that show that the environment is one of their priorities. Businesses and companies that fail to react to the market will become dinosaurs or in the words of Wal-Mart President & CEO Lee Scott:

“sustainability was one of those things that we were paying very little attention to, but yet more and more of our customers were paying attention to it. And the people who weren’t interacting and weren’t connecting to sustainability, as I looked at them, seemed to be that they were going to become less and less relevant.”

Less relevant. Hmmm. There is no argument from me that Wal-Mart has embraced sustainable practices. They have not just relabeled themselves to make it in a eco-friendlier business world. Even Lloyd Alter over at TreeHugger admits It’s Getting Harder to Hate Wal-Mart with a long list of reasons why. The mega-corporation’s new environmental initiatives are sound.

The fact remains that Wal-Mart has integrated sustainable practices because it’s good for business. A huge, billion dollar business. It’s still allright to loathe the company’s foreign product sourcing, discrimination tactics, union-busting practices and long list of other social ills that have built the dynasty. Or even just to hate it for its size.

Wal-Mart has made impressive efforts to become a greener mega-corporation but it’s no sacrifice, it’s a business strategy with benefits. The truth is Wal-Mart owes us and it’s about time they started paying up. The reality is they’ve just realized that they’ll save money by making good on their environmental deficits.

Read more:

• The Impossibility of a Green Wal-Mart at Grist
• A Good Switch or a Bad Switch? at Grist
• Is Wal-Mart Going Green? at MSNBC
• Wal-Mart Grows Green Strategies at USA Today
• Wal-Mart to Pay $1 Million Fine and Establish $4.5 Million Environmental Plan at EPA
  
• Wal-Mart Embraces Sustainability: Does the SRI community buy it? at Social Funds