A Green Wal-Mart?

Will Wall-Mart lead the way forward in the arena of "big box store environmentalism?"

I had some small hope of that six or seven years ago, when Leslie Dach first joined the board of Wal-Mart. Now it seems that a little of that might be coming to pass.

The latest news is that Wal-Mart intends to start educating its customers by creating a massive 'sustainability index' that will measure the environmental impact of every single item stocked in its stores.

Want to take a peek at some of the questions asked of Wal-Mart suppliers? Here are a few:

Material Efficiency: Reducing Waste and Enhancing Quality

1. If measured, please report the total amount of solid waste generated from the facilities that produce your product(s) for Wal-mart for the most recent year measured.

2. Have you set publicly available solid waste reduction targets? If yes, what are those targets?

3. If measured, please report total water use from facilities that produce your product(s) for Wal-mart for the most recent year measured.

4. Have you set publicly available water use reduction targets? If yes, what are those targets?

Natural Resources: Producing High Quality, Responsibly Sourced Raw Materials

1. Have you established publicly available sustainability purchasing guidelines for your direct suppliers that address issues such as environmental compliance, employment practices and product/ingredient safety?

2. Have you obtained 3rd party certifications for any of the products that you sell to Wal-mart?

People and Community: Ensuring Responsible and Ethical Production

1. Do you know the location of 100 percent of the facilities that produce your product(s)?

2. Before beginning a business relationship with a manufacturing facility, do you evaluate the quality of, and capacity for, production?

3. Do you have a process for managing social compliance at the manufacturing level?

4. Do you work with your supply base to resolve issues found during social compliance evaluations and also document specific corrections and improvements?

5. Do you invest in community development activities in the markets you source from and/or operate within?

These are pretty broad questions. Some are a little vague in my opinion, and it remains to be seen how they will be operationalized into a sustainability score. One also wonders how they will "ground truthed" for veracity.

Still, it's a start.... If it works, it will be a big deal. We will see.

In the interim, we can see what Wal-Mart is doing right now. Consider this description of The Wal-mart Supercenter that opened in Tullytown (a suburb of Philadelphia) this week:

Seven wide aisles are filled with plastic storage containers, six aisles with DVDs and five aisles of bath towels. The meat section stretches farther than a football field. The soda sector is bigger than a Taco Bell.

A super-sized store is not necessarily evil; it can result in increased efficiencies on multiple levels, such as energy. All the same, I cringe at this store's description.

Can a big box store ever be truly "green" or good for American if if everything in it is made in China? Click on the map, below, to see "the world according to Wal-Mart." Note that Note that Africa doesn’t even exist on this map!



Do we really need to see all of the choices in all of the world at one location? Isn't that why God made the Internet?

And finally, of course, there is the fact that Wal-Mart is not always a good neighbor, not only to mom-and-pop retailers (all three of them that are left) but also to the sense of history and palce that is every community.

Here in Virginia, for example, Wal-Mart is intent on building a 240,000 square foot big-box development within the boundaries of the Civil War's Wilderness Battlefield, just across the road from the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park in Orange County.

The conscience riots: Is nothing sacred? I am no fan of Virginia's infatuation with the Civil War. I prefer to define the state I love by more than four years of failed insurrection that resulted in scores of thousands of men killed and wounded in the name of perpetuating pure evil. That said, history is to be preserved, not swept under the rug, and perhaps the Wildnerness Battlefield is not the best place for big box store? How can Wal-Mart miss this?

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