Walmart Meeting Focused on Sustainability

Last week at the annual Walmart shareholders meeting, the focus was on sustainabilty. Last week Rand Waddoups, Senior Director of Business Strategy and Sustainability for Wal-Mart talked to Leslie Guevarra at at Greener Design about the goals that drive Wal-Mart’s journey in sustainability.

You can read the full article here. Following is a key point summary.

Background on Walmart Sustainability

In 2005 Walmart set these goals:

• 100 percent renewables
• zero waste and to
• products on the shelves that sustain the environment

Progress on Waste:

• measuring the waste on a store level
• analyzing gos into the trash can
• diverting some waste streams into new things:
  - breaking down returned plastic products and sending them to Bissell to be made into vacuum cleaners
  - making railroad ties from old oil bottlesAnd some of the fun things we’ve done there on our energy side …

Energy Goals

• measuring energy usage
• reduce energy
  - in one Las Vegas store, they’ve achieved a 40 percent energy reduction in a newly built, super-efficient store
  - purchasing wind from Texas
  - working with solar
  - started doing wind, micro-wind, projects in stores,  including one where we’re trying out a windmill on top of a light pole

Progress on Products

• using compacted laundry detergent, made by taking the water out, which allows for a smaller bottle
• became the largest purchaser of organic apparel in the world
• worked with our Procter & Gamble to create Tide Coldwater so that clothes can be washed in cold water
• set a goal a year and a half ago to reduce the energy use of our television sets by 30 percent
• selling RoHS-compliant electronics as opposed to normal electronics

Waddoups stressed the idea of collaboration in sustainability.

“It’s impossible to truly be an expert in sustainability because it’s huge. And so what you do is you immediately start to reach out to more and more people, and you realize the number of stakeholders that want to help you in this space — non-governmental organizations, the government, industry organizations, other suppliers, your own people who are really excited about this topic.”

He went on to discuss the integration of  sustainability into the way we do business, as opposed to making it a separate function. He says the associates are engaged and excited about the companies initiatives, that they are living it in their personal lives as well as at work.

“”You know, I have an idea. What about our opportunities to help with the issues around declining seafood populations in the U.S., and can we do some things differently to be able to affect that? And what about the fact that in the back of our stores our Coke machines have lights on when they don’t need to? … Let’s pull out those lights.” And we did, by the way, and we calculated the savings of pulling out the lights of all of the Coke machines in the backs of our stores, and it was about a million dollars in savings — electricity savings.”

Image Credit: AthenaPix, Flickr