Two years ago, Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott announced a bold initiative to turn the world’s largest corporation green. After numerous delays, the company has finally released a first progress report.
So how much greener are they? To find out, you first need to wade through 40 pages of data on other various and sundry issues. For example, the report boasts that company employees enrolled in a Personal Sustainability Project lost a combined total of 184,315 pounds in 2006 (1.3 pounds per enrollee).
The
Big Box Collaborative, a loose network of groups committed to transforming the “Wal-Mart Economy,” released a damning critique of the company’s sustainability initiative in September. With contributions from 23 organizations, the report blasts many of Wal-Mart’s efforts to provide “sustainable” products as greenwashing.
Food and Water Watch, for example, charges that the seafood certification program, the Marine Stewardship Council, has a record of accrediting fisheries with poor environmental records and questions whether seafood could ever be sourced sustainably on the massive scale Wal-Mart requires.
The bulk of the report argues that Wal-Mart will never be a sustainable company as long as it is a major contributor to sprawl, relies on sourcing products from the other side of the globe, and pursues a business model based on slashing costs to the bone.
The report points out, for example, that the company’s global warming goals leave many sources of greenhouse gases off the table, including all the pollution spewed by the company’s tens of thousands of supplier factories and the ships that haul all the stuff from China. In total, Wal-Mart is responsible for greenhouse gases that are the equivalent of nearly half the amount produced by the entire country of France, according to analysis by Friends of the Earth and the Institute for Policy Studies.
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