Wal-Mart Opens 4 “Efficient” Stores - Only 6,796 Energy Hogs to Go

Wal-Mart announced plans today for four new “energy-efficient” stores, the first which will open in Illinois later this month. Utilizing new refrigeration techniques and LED lighting, the new stores are projected to be 25% more efficient than the usual Supercenter. The company touts the efficient stores as not only green, but cheaper, too, though as an article out today from BusinessWeek points out:

“When Wal-Mart (WMT) tells their suppliers to stop shipping in [costly] bulky packaging, it’s not for the consumer. It’s for the company,” Leimsider said. “The good news is that the green revolution is moving beyond corporate reputation issues.”

And reputation has a lot to do with it. If the company is saving money AND winning acclaim with its new stores, why aren’t all 170+ new stores this year going to be green? Perhaps because Wal-Mart’s just looking for a little breathing room:

Under fire from labor unions and employee groups, Wal-Mart has embraced the environment as a way to improve its image and cut costs. The retailer launched a plan in 2005 to make Wal-Mart more eco-friendly, from the products it carries on its shelves to the energy it uses to operate its stores to the fuel efficiency of its truck fleets.

The company’s initiatives are definitely a step in the right direction, but they’re incrimental and certainly don’t earn the retailer a free pass on environmental issues. It’s more important now than ever to keep pressure on the company to follow through on its environmental promises. To help this effort, join our environmental task force at http://walmartwatch.com/environment.

Wal-Mart to open eco-friendly superstore in Romeoville [Chicago Tribune]

The full text of this article as well as a multimedia slide show are available here.

You couldn’t tell by looking at it, but the concrete floor at the soon-to-be opened Wal-Mart Supercenter in Romeoville is made from leftover coal waste. The decorative floor boards and moldings are fashioned from material used in making the leg holes in disposable diapers. And the low-flow sensors in the bathroom sinks run off batteries charged by a turbine powered by water from the faucets.

Not your typical Wal-Mart, perhaps. But the eco-friendly store, slated to open Jan. 23, is the first of a handful of pilot stores the huge retailer plans to open nationwide in its latest push to go green and boost its image at the same time.

The store is first in a second wave of high-efficiency stores that Wal-Mart is testing in the wake of Chairman and Chief Executive H. Lee Scott’s call more than two years ago to turn the world’s largest retailer into a model of sustainability.

Wal-Mart is working to make any new store it builds after 2009 25 percent to 30 percent more energy efficient. And it plans to retrofit its existing stores—thousands of general discount stores, Sam’s Clubs and international stores—to use 20 percent less energy by 2012.

The green bug is spreading across the retail industry. In the last year, J.C. Penney Co., Kohl’s Corp., Macy’s Inc. and Best Buy Co. opened eco-friendly test stores, touting such features as solar panels, recycled carpet and organic paint.

“This is part of a trend where big consumer brands need to be seen as green,” said Joel Makower, a green business guru and founder of Greener World Media Inc. “Companies are transforming the way they build their stores, the way they light them, the way they heat them. It’s really about a new way of doing retailing. This isn’t a fad. This is a bell you can’t unring.”

At first glance, the eco-friendly stores don’t look that different from standard stores. And consumers usually can’t tell the difference.

But when done right, the stores can drastically reduce one of a retailer’s biggest costs: power. Wal-Mart, which operates more than 4,000 U.S. stores, is believed to be the largest private user of electricity in the U.S. The resource is so crucial to operations that it monitors electricity consumption from a control center at its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

No wasted heat
In a tour of its Romeoville outpost, Don Moseley, director of sustainable facilities, points out myriad changes, from roof to floorboards.

But some of the biggest savings in the pilot store come from reclaiming waste heat from the refrigeration equipment that keeps groceries cold. Instead of letting that heat rise into the atmosphere, compact units are installed on the roof where heat is captured and reused.

The Romeoville store also has a new system for keeping refrigerated food cold that lowers the use of refrigerant by 90 percent, and in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Other bells and whistles: motion-sensitive light-emitting diodes in refrigerator and freezer cases that turn on only when a shopper walks by; doors in the meat and dairy refrigerated sections, instead of open refrigerator shelves, that conserve cold air; and roughly 200 skylights that allow electric lights to go down when the sun comes out.

“It’s good for business and it’s good for the environment,” said Moseley.

Image makeover
Under fire from labor unions and employee groups, Wal-Mart has embraced the environment as a way to improve its image and cut costs. The retailer launched a plan in 2005 to make Wal-Mart more eco-friendly, from the products it carries on its shelves to the energy it uses to operate its stores to the fuel efficiency of its truck fleets.

That same year the retailer opened two stores, one in Texas and one in Colorado, that it calls “living laboratories” for more than 50 different energy-saving technologies. It is taking some of the lessons learned there and putting them to the test in prototypes.

The first wave of four test stores, including one in Rockton, Ill., opened in 2007. They saved 20 percent of the energy used in a typical Wal-Mart store, the company said. The second-generation stores, starting with Romeoville, will save 25 percent. Wal-Mart plans to open a handful of stores like the one in Romeoville in different climates in the U.S. this year.

“These stores are another solid step toward achieving our environmental commitments,” said Leslie Dach, executive vice president of corporate affairs and government relations in a speech on Wal-Mart’s green efforts delivered Tuesday to the National Retail Federation in New York. “But we know we can’t stop there.”

As previously announced, starting Feb. 1 Wal-Mart will begin scoring its vendors on the sustainability of their packaging and rate them relative to their competitors. The results are expected to influence Wal-Mart’s buying decisions. The retailer aims to reduce overall packaging in its supply chain by 5 percent by 2013.

Consumer-behavior expert Brit Beemer is not convinced that Wal-Mart’s eco-efforts make that much of a difference to shoppers. Only about one-third of consumers care about environmentally friendly products, and only 16 percent are willing to pay extra for them, according to surveys from America’s Research Group, the Charleston, S.C.-based company he founded.

“When you’re Wal-Mart, you try to get any positive press you can,” said Beemer. “That’s crucial for them right now. At least they can say they’re making progress.”

Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, January 16, 2008