A Green Wal-Mart? Not So Fast…

Ah Wal-Mart, the giant behemoth of a corporation, with a larger GDP than most countries and a matching environmental footprint to boot. Sure, they’ve been making noise about going eco-friendly and some blogs have fallen all over themselves to grace them with the mantle of green, but we’re still talking about a company with over 7,000 (and growing) stadium sized stores that makes most of their money selling tons of cheap plastic crap shipped over from China.

Alex Goldschmidt, online editor at Wal-Mart Watch, does a good job of killing the golden calf that is a green Wal-Mart in a guest essay at Grist titled But three of its stores have skylights. How bad could it be?. Here’s a snip, head over and read the whole thing, it’s really good.

Wal-Mart’s public relations efforts help hide the fact that despite all its talk, the company isn’t any greener than it was in 2005 when it laid out a series of company-wide environmental initiatives. The fact remains that Wal-Mart’s energy use is still rising. Until the company significantly reduces the amount of energy used to earn a dollar, its sustainability initiatives remain fundamentally flawed. Several aspects of the company’s basic business model hinder this kind of comprehensive change:

Land consumption and pollution. With the average Wal-Mart Supercenter the size of a football stadium, and parking lots often three times that size, each Wal-Mart store consumes massive amounts of land and the parking lots contribute to water pollution. Multiply that by over 7,000 Wal-Mart stores worldwide, and plans to build hundreds more every year. Wal-Mart frequently chooses to build new stores rather than renovate old ones, multiplying its impact on local land resources.

Car culture. To shop at Wal-Mart stores, consumers must drive cars. 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. Studies also show that larger stores, such as Wal-Mart, 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 the weekend. Increased traffic results in increased carbon emissions.

Energy consumption. We applaud Wal-Mart’s efforts to cut energy use in some stores, but the company has a long way to go. Every few years Wal-Mart opens a few greener stores and hundreds of its traditional, energy-draining stores. While Wal-Mart hopes to make its existing stores 20 percent more efficient by 2013, the energy used by the hundreds of new stores it opens every year will significantly offset any savings and its carbon footprint will only grow larger.

So the take away here is that despite Wal-Mart’s admirable efforts to spin itself green, they remain a vastly unsustainable company with a grossly unsustainable business model. in short- Wal-Mart still sucks.

Link [Gristmill]

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