Wal-Mart’s ‘Sustainability 360’ not so green after all

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Wal-Mart’s ‘Sustainability 360’ not so green after all [Bozeman Daily Chronicle (Mont.)]

Earlier this year, H. Lee Scott, CEO and President of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., outlined the mega-retailer’s ambitious environmental initiative, “Sustainability 360.” The bottom line is that Wal-Mart’s “Sustainability 360” initiative is all about the most important bottom line: decreasing costs to increase profits.

Back of the napkin calculations reveal that going green would save the world’s largest retailer more than $6 billion annually. Wal-Mart’s sudden and grandiose green proposals have put the $312 billion
Corporation under the environmental microscope revealing the company’s true colors.

Wal-Mart intends to sell more than 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs in 2007. If successful, consumers would save nearly $3 billion in electrical costs, conserve 50 billion tons of coal, and keep
over 1 billion traditional light bulbs out of landfills. Although the sale of CF bulbs ultimately benefits not only the environment but also the consumer, Wal-Mart has been very slow to acknowledge that CF bulbs are a source of the neurotoxin mercury. CF bulbs can be safely recycled, but Wal-Mart has yet to institute a comprehensive recycling program in order to prevent improper disposal of the CF bulbs.

In an effort to mitigate its mega carbon footprint, Wal-Mart has set a goal to reduce the company’s CO2 emissions at existing stores by 2.5 million metric tons over the next seven years. Such a reduction sounds substantial except when considering that the new Wal-Mart stores built in 2007 alone will consume enough energy to produce an additional 1 million tons of CO2. Subsequently, by 2013Wal-Mart will negate its CO2 reductions goal tenfold by adding an additional 28 million metric tons of emissions from new stores built over the same seven-year period.

Despite what on the surface seems to be a comprehensive environmental plan, Wal-Mart glosses over a myriad of ecological issues that would prove much more difficult, if not completely impossible, to address. According to a recent study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Wal-Mart owns 50,000 acres of parking lots associated with its chain of stores. Excessive run-off from sprawling parking lots contain high levels of pollutants such as sediment, trace metals, phosphorus, nitrogen and hydrocarbons.

Forbes magazine and others documented that in 2001, the EPA and Justice Department fined Wal-Mart $5.5 million for violating newly adopted standards for storm water runoff. Time and time again, the
world’s most profitable company has merely paid the fines levied for its environmental violations rather than comply in the first place.

During the last 15 years, American’s have increased the number of miles they drive to go shopping by more than 40 percent. The proliferation of bigbox stores, led by Wal-Mart, has resulted in
customers driving longer distances to reap the perceived benefits of shopping at mega-retailers, which because of their immense square footage and gigantic parking lots must be located farther and farther from population centers.

To this point, independent business advocate Stacy Mitchell estimates that Americans are driving more than 365 billion miles annually just to go shopping. Considering that Wal-Mart accounts for 10 percent of retail sales nationwide, the country’s largest retailer is responsible for over 15 million metric tons of CO2 emissions generated by its customers. Wal-Mart has done nothing to address this considerable environmental impact of their customer’s increasingly vehicle-dependent shopping habits.

A telling indication of Wal-Mart’s commitment to the environment can be found by analyzing the company’s political contributions. Wal-Mart’s “PAC for Responsible Government” is the nation’s third largest corporate political action committee. According to Corporate Ethics International, Wal-Mart supported 30 members of Congress who scored zero percent on the League of Conservation Voters National Environmental Scorecard for the 109th Congress. On the one hand, Wal-Mart is aggressively advertising its numerous environmental initiatives, but behind the scenes, Wal-Mart is subsidizing members of Congress that consistently support anti-environment legislation.

The evidence suggests that Wal-Mart’s “Sustainability 360” initiatives are completely self-serving. Going green will save the world’s largest retailer billions of dollars annually and contribute to the company’s efforts to regain credibility and customer confidence.

But for Wal-Mart going green amounts to nothing more than greenwashing if they continue to pay millions of dollars in fines for environmental violations rather than change their business practices.
The green-washing label becomes more deserved considering Wal-Mart’s financial support of anti-environment members of Congress. In the end, Wal-Mart’s selfspun green image is merely a shade of green - or just plain shady - at best.

Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, October 24, 2007

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