Walmart mixed results on sustainability
Walmart’s global milestone meeting on Tuesday demonstrated that the company has met many of its sustainability goals. Areas where the company has made progress include supply chain emissions, preserving habitat, fleet efficiency and opposition to human trafficking in the seafood industry. However, the company is still falling short in certain areas. It has failed to set science-based targets for its climate emissions and has made slow progress towards the goal of buying 100 per cent renewable energy. Walmart currently ranks 17th on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s  list of green power users. The company has also failed to support Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

It’s been 10 years since Lee Scott, the then-CEO of Walmart, publicly set the giant retailer on a path towards sustainability. In an influential speech, “Twenty-First Century Leadership”, Scott pledged that the company someday would be supplied entirely by renewable energy, that it would eliminate waste and that it would sell products that sustain people and the environment.

Walmart’s not there yet. But on Tuesday, the company held a global milestone meeting to mark its progress after a decade, and no fair-minded person who attended could fail to be impressed with the company’s accomplishments.

Walmart, already famously efficient by the mid-2000s, has become more so, driving efficiency and sustainable practices deeper into its supply chain so that food is grown with less fertilizer, stuff arrives with less packaging, trucks use less fuel and fisheries are better managed.

But the 90-minute milestone meeting – a tedious, scripted and self-congratulatory affair – also painted a one-sided, relentlessly upbeat picture of Walmart and the planet. Rainbows and unicorns were the order of the day, as leaders of several of America’s biggest environmental groups paid obeisance to the powerful Bentonville retailer. There was nary a discouraging word about rising global temperatures or species loss.

Here are some highlights and some issues that were notably absent from the script.

Where Walmart is making progress

Supply chain emissions



In 2010, Walmart promised to eliminate 20m metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its global supply chain by the end of 2015. The company announced that it has exceeded this commitment early by eliminating 28.2m metric tons to date, the equivalent of taking more than 5.9m cars off the road for a year. Much of this came by asking suppliers in the food industry to work with farmers.

“Fertilizer use on farms was a big opportunity, perhaps the biggest in the entire supply chain,” said Elizabeth Sturcken of the Environmental Defense Fund, a key partner in the effort. Through such initiatives as Field to Market, an agricultural industry alliance that shares best practices, this initiative will spread far beyond Walmart.

Fleet efficiency



The company has doubled the efficiency of its fleet since 2005. It has improved the way it loads, routes and drives its trucks, and worked with tractor and trailer manufacturers on designs that, again, will spread widely. The company says it will save $1bn a year as a result.

Preserving habitat



Walmart has been justly criticized for contributing to suburban sprawl by building vast stores surrounded by massive parking lots. But the company aims to permanently conserve at least one acre of priority wildlife habitat for every developed acre of the company’s current and future footprint.

In the last 10 years, Walmart, working with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, has helped preserve and restore more than 1m acres of wildlife habitat through 61 projects in 33 states through the Acres for America program. It’s the biggest corporate conservation program ever according to Jeff Trandahl, CEO of the foundation.

The company also showcased its efforts to improve the lives of people in its supply chain, through its support of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and a new effort to combat human trafficking in the seafood industry.

Where Walmart is falling short of its potential

Climate change



On climate change, arguably the most important environmental issue of the day, Walmart has made some progress – but not enough. After nearly a decade of rising greenhouse gas emissions, Walmart’s emissions from its stores and fleet peaked in 2012. They’ve declined slightly since then. That’s a major feat given the company continues to grow. Holding emissions steady, or driving them down, while adding stores is hard to do.



But Walmart has failed to set science-based targets for its climate emissions. Put another way, its goals are not ambitious enough to align with the global effort to keep warming below the level that scientists say is needed to prevent some of the most severe impacts of climate change.

Renewable energy



Walmart is falling short on the climate issue in part because its progress towards the goal of buying 100% renewable energy has been slow. Globally, about 26% of its energy comes from renewable sources; in the US, it’s about 13%, and that includes electricity from the grid that happens to come from renewable sources. Walmart ranks number 17 on EPA’s latest list of green power users.

Because Walmart is so focused on controlling costs – its mantra is: “We save people money so they can live better” – the company won’t spend more for energy than it needs to. Kathleen McLaughlin, Walmart’s chief sustainability officer, told me by phone that the company buys wind or solar power “where the economics work for us”. That’s why Walmart buys more of its renewable energy in California, Texas, New Jersey, Arizona and Hawaii, where policies favor solar or wind and electricity costs.

Supporting carbon policy



What Walmart hasn’t done yet is become a strong voice for clean energy policies, by throwing its support behind the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulates utilities, or an economy-wide carbon price. “We’re not economists,” McLaughlin said, when asked why. “We’re not experts on other industries.”

That may be true, but Lee Scott also wasn’t an expert on sustainability when he summoned the courage to publicly commit Walmart to achieving big, challenging environmental goals. Doug McMillon, who is now Walmart’s CEO, and Rob Walton, the company’s longtime chairman of the board, encouraged him to speak up and step out. They can now take the company to the next level, if they choose to do so.