by
Stacy Mitchell
Walmart adopted sustainability as a corporate strategy in 2005. It
was struggling mightily at the time. Bad headlines stalked the chain, as
its history of mistreating workers and suppliers finally caught up with
it. One analysis found that as many as 8 percent of Walmart’s customers
had stopped shopping at its stores. Grassroots groups were blocking or
delaying one-third of its development projects. Stockholders were
growing nervous. Between 2000 and 2005, Walmart’s share price fell 20
percent.
As then-CEO Lee Scott
told The New York Times,
improving labor conditions would cost too much. It would also mean
ceding some control to employees and perhaps even a union. Going green
was a better option for repairing the company’s image. It offered ways
to cut costs and, rather than undermining Walmart’s control,
sustainability could actually augment its power over suppliers.
Environmentalism also had strong appeal among urban liberals in the
Northeast and West Coast — the very markets Walmart needed to penetrate
in order to keep its U.S. growth going.
Since Scott first unveiled Walmart’s sustainability program, the
company’s head office in Bentonville, Ark., has issued a steady stream
of announcements about cutting energy use, reducing waste, and, more
recently, selling healthier food. Most of these announcements declare
goals, not achievements. But the goals sound audacious enough to
reliably produce sweeping headlines and breathless accounts of how
Walmart could remake the world by bending industrial production to its
will.
By 2010, the number of Americans reporting an unfavorable view of
Walmart had fallen by nearly half, from a peak of 38 percent in 2005, to
20 percent.
What the news media haven’t reported
As I started to work on this series, I looked back at the coverage of
Walmart’s sustainability campaign over the last six years and was
shocked by just how much of a public relations boost the media have
given the company and how little public accountability they have
demanded in return.
Some of the most serious environmental consequences of Walmart’s
business model simply aren’t on the table. Walmart doesn’t talk about
them and, despite expending a lot of ink and airtime on the company’s
green activities, the news media don’t either. Indeed, journalists
rarely stray beyond the parameters of what Walmart has put in front of
them.
More surprising is the absence of basic information essential to
evaluating what Walmart is actually accomplishing. Take, for example,
the share of Walmart’s electricity that comes from renewable sources.
There have been thousands of news stories and blog posts on the
company’s renewable energy activities since 2005, so one would think
this number would be reported often. I couldn’t find it anywhere. (I did
eventually dig up enough data to figure it out myself. The answer:
less than 2 percent of the company’s electric power in the U.S. comes from its wind and solar projects.)
Or take the case of the Sustainability Index, Walmart’s
much-publicized effort to put a green rating on every product it sells.
Two years after the media fanfare surrounding the announcement, no
journalist, as far as I can tell, has investigated what progress, if
any, Walmart has actually made. (According to my research: not much.)
This series aims to fill in some of these gaps and, hopefully,
inspire other writers and journalists to take a closer look at what
Walmart is and isn’t doing.
What environmentalists haven’t paid attention to
“Walmart is here to stay” — that’s the refrain I often hear from the
many environmental organizations and green-business advocates who have
applauded the company’s sustainability efforts. The world’s largest
retailer isn’t going away, the thinking goes, so anything it does to
reduce its footprint is a good thing.
But Walmart circa 2005 is, in fact, long gone. Today’s Walmart is
much, much bigger. It sells 35 percent more stuff in the U.S., and its
international store count has almost tripled, from about 1,600 to 4,600
stores.
For Walmart, sustainability is a growth strategy — and a highly
effective (and darkly ironic) one at that. Six years ago, Walmart was
facing widespread opposition, including legislation that would have
required better labor practices and limited the company’s growth. Thanks
at least in part to its sustainability campaign, and the warm reception
from many environmentalists, those roadblocks have eroded and Walmart’s
expansion is once again rolling at full speed.
As it grows, Walmart pushes out existing enterprises and local
economic systems and replaces them with its own, often far more
polluting, global supply chain and sprawling stores. If any single fact
could sum up what’s at stake, it would be that Walmart now controls
one-quarter of our country’s grocery sales and aims to capture half — a
prospect with disastrous implications for the environment, social
justice, and local economies.
So far, though, most mainstream environmental organizations have
focused on the small bits of good that Walmart could do — reduce PVC in
packaging, for example — while ignoring the much larger consequences of
its ever-expanding business model.
This series will mark, we hope, the beginning of a more comprehensive
and critical response to Walmart’s sustainability initiatives.
Read the articles in the series:
As Drought Hits Key Crops, Fears of Food Crisis Loom
ren't
critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn't the debate
over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between emotional but
ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting scientists on
the other?
