Wal-Mart is going green

There could be some lessons for Asheville in this Wal-Mart initiative. The Big Money breaks it:

The giant retailer ($406 billion in revenues in 2008) is developing an ambitious, comprehensive, and fiendishly complex plan to measure the sustainability of every product it sells. Wal-Mart has been working quietly on what it calls a "sustainability index" for more than a year, and it will take another year or two for labels to appear on products. But the company's grand plan-"audacious beyond words" is how one insider describes it-has the potential to transform retailing by requiring manufacturers of consumer products to dig deep into their supply chains, measure their environmental impact, and compete on those terms for favorable treatment from the world's most powerful retailer.

Wal-Mart intends to announce the sustainability index at a meeting on Thursday, July 16, at its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to which hundreds of suppliers, academics, environmentalists, and government officials have been invited. There, the company will unveil a sustainability consortium led by the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University that will provide scientific research to support the effort. Faculty at Duke, Harvard, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Michigan have been involved in planning the index, but they haven't yet agreed to join the consortium, in part because some college administrators are skittish about working with Wal-Mart. Consumer-goods companiesProcter & Gamble (PG), General Mills (GIS), Tyson (TSN), and Unilever (UN), among others, are partners in the consortium. And competing retailers including Costco (COST), Target (TGT), andKroger (KR) have been invited to join. This is, in other words, a very big deal.

Comments

[WNC Observer]

If it was anyone but wally world, i would be less suspicious of what it might really mean.

[eemilla]

Sounds nice, but it's MallWart. Too bad they don't want to create a labor index so consumers can be more informed about the humans behind all of those low prices.

[Jeff Fobes]

For a detailed and balanced look at Wal-Mart's sustainability index, by Joel Makower, which appeared on Treehugger.com, read:

http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2009/07/walmarts-sustainability-index-the-hype-and-the-hope.html

Two excerpts:
"Despite what the headlines have been saying the past few days, this isn't a product-rating scheme — at least not yet, and likely not for several years. For now, Walmart will be using the results of the 15-question survey to assess companies. The questions, as you'll see, don't get down to the product level. In a second phase, the company plans to develop more sector-specific questions — say, for agricultural products or jewelry or electronics. Eventually, the company hopes that the Index will address individual products. But that's not currently in the works."
...
"As for the 15 questions. Well, they're a start. Taken together, they set a fairly middling bar, the kinds of things that some leadership companies have been doing for a decade or more. And because they deal with the company, and not its products, they omit some fairly critical details. Among them: they don't mention toxic materials used in manufacturing or in the products themselves. They don't talk about the energy efficiency of products or their recyclability or other disposition at the end of their useful lives. One need only compare Walmart's Index to Nike's Considered Index, which goes deep into product details, to see how relatively primitive it is. "