Issues | Environment

Wal-Mart has made a name for itself over the past year by highlighting various environmental initiatives, which is sees as an easy way to improve its image. While reducing packaging on food products and selling more energy efficient light bulbs are important steps that Wal-Mart should be applauded for, they must do much more to make amends for an environmentally unfriendly past. In the past, Wal-Mart has been guilty of air pollution, storm water violations, and improper storage of hazardous materials. With millions in fines resulting from these violations, Wal-Mart’s environmental record has been blemished.

For more on how you can help hold Wal-Mart responsible for its environmental promises, visit our Environmental Activists page.

Examining Wal-Mart's Environmental Promises

		Is Wal-Mart Really a "Green" Company? While Wal-Mart has taken some commendable steps forward during the past year, the company has a long way to go to reverse the damage it has inflicted and show it is serious about its environmental efforts.  (PDF)

Wal-Mart Breaking Environmental Laws

Enforcement agencies agree: when it comes to following rules, Wal-Mart can do better:

• Slapped with Fines Across the Country. In 2004, Wal-Mart  faced fines for violations of environmental laws in nine states: California, Colorado, Delaware, Michigan, New Jersey, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Utah. [Associated Press, 5/12/04; New York Times, 4/13/05]
• Forced to Settle Air Pollution Claims. In 2004, Wal-Mart agreed to pay $400,000 to the government to settle claims that Sam's Club had flouted federal air pollution regulations in eleven states. [The Business Journal, 1/30/04]
• Widespread Water Pollution. In 2001, the EPA and Justice Department for the first time fined a company -- Wal-Mart -- for violating newly adopted standards for stormwater runoff. Wal-Mart paid $5.5 million in fines for violations at construction sites in four states: Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. Four years later, however, Wal-Mart signed an agreement with the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection over storm water violations occurring over seven years at 20 stores, and agreed to pay $1,550,000 in penalties. [Underground Construction, 8/1/01; Forbes, 8/15/05]
• Contaminating Water in Georgia. Georgia's Environmental Protection Division (EPD) fined Wal-Mart for letting polluted storm water run free into state waters -- resulting in $170,000 in penalties for pollution at two sites. Wal-Mart failed to take basic steps to help clean storm runoff, such as maintaining silt fencing around construction zones, installing ponds to catch storm water, and failure to keep records. The fines ranked among the highest paid in Georgia for violations of the Clean Water Act. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/10/05]
• In Florida, Oil Storage Problems. Florida forced Wal-Mart to pay $765,000 in fines for operating outside safety restrictions on petroleum storage at its auto service centers. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection flagged the company for failing to register its fuel tanks with the state or install devices that prevent gasoline overflows. According to the state, Wal-Mart also failed to perform monthly safety checks, lacked current technologies to prevent overflows, blocked state inspectors from reviewing records and failed to show proper insurance documentation. [Associated Press, 11/18/04]

Wal-Mart Watch In Depth: Sustaining Wal-Mart

		Sustaining Wal-Mart The March/April issue of Wal-Mart Watch In Depth examines Wal-Mart's sustainability: not only their environmental efforts, but their business model as a whole. Articles examine Wal-Mart's land use strategies, exhaustive labor practices and ways the company can improve its prospects. (PDF)

Wal-Mart's Sustainability Record

For considerations aside from expense or convenience, the company can have a tin ear.

• Skepticism over Wal-Mart's New 'sustainable' Jewelry The raw materials for Wal-Mart’s Love, Earth line are extracted by the Anglo-Australian mining company, Rio Tinto, and a major gold producer, Newmont Mining Corp. These companies are interesting choices, to say the least. Rio Tinto is currently fighting a suit under the federal Alien Tort Claims Act that blames the company for the deaths of thousands of Bougainville islanders in Papua New Guinea. Rio Tinto’s copper mine, the suit alleges, resulted in environmental destruction and crimes against humanity stemming from a military blockade motivated by civilian resistance to the mine. [Christian Science Monitor Bright Green Blog, 7/17/08]
  

• Lee Scott admits Wal-Mart is not a green company. At the 2008 Eco:nomics conference in California, Lee Scott made a startling revelation about his company. Despite all the pro-environmental speeches, press releases, and commitments, when asked about how Wal-Mart plans to meet the goals of eliminating waste and providing 100% renewable energy, Lee Scott said, "I haven't a clue." He went on to say this about Wal-Mart's environmental strategy and public relations efforts: "It has been positive from a PR standpoint, but one of the things we learned is that we are not sophisticated enough to spin a story -- ultimately, we'd get hammered. We are not out saying we're a green company. We are not green. We have an extraordinary distance to go." [Wall Street Journal, 3/14/08; Grist.org, 3/17/08]
• Wal-Mart has over 2,300 supercenters in the United States. The average Wal-Mart Supercenter is mammoth, averaging 200,000 square feet and occupying 20 to 30 acres of land - about as large as a football stadium. There are over 2,300 supercenters in the United States, in addition to thousands of standard Wal-Marts, Neighborhood Markets, Sam's Clubs, distribution centers and warehouses. It is the largest commercial entity in the United States, both physically and economically, and its stores require massive amounts of land, energy and labor to function. [http://www.walmartfacts.com; San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/21/07]
• Wal-Mart's growth will offset its planned energy savings. Wal-Mart's new stores will use more energy that its energy-saving measures will save. Wal-Mart hopes to cut 2.5 million metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2013, by making its existing stores 20 percent more efficient. New stores built in 2007 alone, however, will consume enough electricity to add approximately one million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. At that rate, (adding one million metric tons of CO2 per year because of new stores), by 2013 Wal-Mart will be offsetting its cut of 2.5 million metric tons of CO2 by adding 28 million metric tons of new emissions within the same time period. [Stacey Mitchell. "Keep your eyes on the size: The impossibility of a green Wal-Mart." www.grist.org, March 28, 2007.]
• Wal-Mart is a major factor in the dramatic increase in amount of distance Americans drive to fill their shopping needs. Wal-Mart has contributed to a jump of more than 40 percent in the amount of vehicle miles American households travel for shopping purposes since 1990. The jump is not attributable to consumers going to the store more often, however, but instead that the average trip is two miles longer. Studies also have found that the size of a store is directly related to the amount of traffic it generates. Larger stores pull customers from a larger geographic area, which results in increased traffic - a 200,000 square-foot Supercenter on average generates over 10,000 car trips during a weekday, and even more on a weekend day. [Institute for Local Self Reliance; Stacey Mitchell. "Keep your eyes on the size: The impossibility of a green Wal-Mart." http://www.grist.org, 3/28/07; Big Box Toolkit - Impact of Big Box Stores on Traffic - www.newrules.org]
• Wal-Mart truck fleet adds major traffic to the roads and pollution to the air. For example, analysts predict a Wal-Mart Distribution Center in Merced, CA will have 900 daily truck trips. Using average emissions rates calculated by the EPA, the 900 truck trip estimate works out to around 2.4 extra tons of particulate matter and 83 extra tons of nitrogen oxides entering the atmosphere each year because of Wal-Mart trucks. Since Merced is an area with significant air pollution problems already, residents living closest to this distribution center would be at an increased risk. Wal-Mart currently has 135 distribution centers in 38 states, which translates to approximately 120,000 daily truck trips or equal to the approximate number of vehicles that use the Lincoln Tunnel on any given day in New York City. [http://www.warnwalmart.org/index.php?id=126;http://www.mercedalliance.org; http://www.walmartfacts.com; ]http://www.nycroads.com/crossings/lincoln/]
• Wal-Mart leaves empty buildings behind. It is estimated that Wal-Mart alone has abandoned over 300 of its stores across the country in order to build newer and larger supercenters, all the while leaving empty concrete shells behind resulting in over 500 million square feet of unused retail space, the approximate amount of industrial space in the entire city of Atlanta,. [Erin Zeiss, "Wal-Mart devastates the environment," Eco-Mind, UVM Environmental Council, 1/23/07; http://www.southeastrebusiness.com/articles/JUN05/cover2.html]
• Wal-Mart's political contributions are anything but green.  Wal-Mart PAC supported 33 members of Congress who scored at the absolute bot­tom -- zero percent -- on the League of Conservation Voters' well-respected score­card of key environmental votes during the last Congress. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2/13/07]
• Wal-Mart's environmental problems lie in its business model.   Often the difficulty is built right into a company's business model. It makes scant difference whether Wal-Mart starts stocking organic food or not, because the real problem is the imperative to ship products all over the world, sell them in vast, downtown-destroying complexes, and push prices so low that neither workers nor responsible suppliers can prosper. [Mother Jones, 12/06]
• Wal-Mart's environmental efforts seem like window-dressing. By building vast warehouses, carrying a huge range of stock and slashing prices, which inevitably lead to smaller retail competitors going out of business and by concreting over thousands of acres of countryside in order to provide car parking around their air-conditioned mammoth warehouses, these measures seem like pitiful window-dressing. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 10/29/06]
• Wal-Mart parking lots contribute to water pollution. A Wal-Mart Supercenter may cover several acres, but its parking lot can be three times the size of the store itself, placing its footprint at well over 18 acres. A 2005 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance estimated at the time that Wal-Mart stores and parking lots covered roughly 75,000 acres (or 117 square miles) in the U.S., equal to the land size of Tampa, Florida, a figure that has continued to rise as Wal-Mart continued to expand over the last two years. Parking lots contribute directly to what is referred to as "non-point source water pollution," the leading cause of water pollution in the United States. [http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/reports/big_box.asp; Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 7/21/05; St. Petersburg Times, 3/25/05]

What You Can Do:

• Join our Environmental Task Force
• Sign the Handshake with Sam agreement and call on Wal-Mart to live up to common environmental standards
• Tell friends and family about Wal-Mart's flawed environmental record -- and how the store can do better