Watch the Wal-Mart Virus Spread Across America

Walking through the crowded, narrow aisles of Wal-Mart, you may be inclined to keep your arms as close to you as possible and avoid touching most surfaces. After all, the place is so crowded at any given time, it wouldn’t be surprising if you took home more than just a $20 stereo. So, it stands to reason that Flowing Data’s map of Wal-Mart’s spread across America between 1965 and 2007 looks like a nasty green virus taking over the country.

It’s kind of mesmerizing to watch, really. It starts out slow and then picks up really quickly. I love that you can zoom, I just wish it had a play bar so you could pause, step ahead, go back, etc. Wal-Mart truly is a plague upon the land.

Visit Flowing Data to see it for yourself.

Link [Flowing Data]

New ‘Green’ Milk Jugs Not Cutting it with Consumers

So, apparently green milk jugs kind of suck. At least, that’s according to the Wal-Mart and Costco shoppers who have purchased the newly redesigned gallon jugs and complain about how hard they are to pour. These new jugs have been introduced because they’re cheaper to ship, better for the environment, cost less and provide fresher milk to the store. The new shape makes the jugs stackable and eliminates the need for crates. Indentations in the plastic give the jugs structural support.

From The New York Times, via Treehugger:

The jugs have no real spout, and their unorthodox shape makes consumers feel like novices at the simple task of pouring a glass of milk.

“I hate it,” said Lisa DeHoff, a cafe owner shopping in a Sam’s Club here.

“It spills everywhere,” said Amy Wise, a homemaker.

“It’s very hard for kids to pour,” said Lee Morris, who was shopping for her grandchildren.

Eco-Fail – not because it’s not innovative or is a bad idea, but because this is the sort of thing that turns off the millions of Wal-Mart shoppers from ‘green’ products and ideas. I mean, great way to turn the Wal-Mart set green – take away their easy pouring milk jugs and give them something to complain about, especially in this nation of resistance to change. They’re more than likely not going to care if the jugs help the environment if they can’t even pour milk into a bowl of cereal without spilling it.

A commenter on the Treehugger post suggested some kind of reusable accessory – stainless steel, perhaps – that mounts onto the jug to make it easier to pour. Great idea, but would Wal-Mart shoppers really go for that? They want simple, cheap and fast. Perhaps another redesign is in the cards – one that’s more practical for everyday use.

Link [The New York Times] via [Treehugger] via [Bag of Nothing]
Photo credit: David Maxwell for the New York Times

Axis of Corporate Evil: Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, and the NRA Hired Black Ops Private Security Team to Spy on Green Activists

Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, and the NRA hired the private security firm Carlyle Group to get all “black ops” on eco-activists asses. They rumaged through their garbage to find confidential documents (the lesson here- shred your papers) and even social security numbers.

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

In addition to focusing on environmentalists, the firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), provided a range of services to a host of clients. According to its billing records, BBI engaged in “intelligence collection” for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided “protective services” for the National Rifle Association; it handled “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in “information collection” for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted “surveillance,” and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.

Evil motherbleeping corporations. Souless, hungry, exploitative corporations. Grrr… This stuff makes Mr. Cranky Green mad!

Link [Mother Jones] via [The Raw Story]

Video Shows Growth of Wal-Mart Matches Outbreak of Infectious Disease

This is awesome- Kiwi Tobes has a downright creepy video showing the growth of Wal-Mart since its founding. I’d be willing to lay a tenner down on the table betting that the growth of Wal-Mart is similar to the outbreak pattern of an infectious disease released from Bentonville- think Stephen Kings The Stand here.

It’s pretty damn clever how the video was put together. Here’s what Kiki Tobes says:

Freebase has a topic for every zip code, along with it’s longitude and latitude. Here’s one example. One query pulls out all the ZIP codes along with their longitudes and latitudes. You can turn longitudes and latitudes into graphical coordinates with some simple transformations (which will vary based on the region you’re plotting and how big your image is) — here are the ones I used:

x=(longitude+127)*16
y=(50-latitude)*20

If you plot all the ZIP codes using a library like PIL, you get a nice map with dots that roughly match population density, which has the advantage of looking a little bit like a night-time satellite photo of the United States.

Freebase also contains a list of Wal-mart locations, along with their addresses and the year that they opened. Here’s an example. One query pulls all of these out of Freebase.

To create the animation, I generated 30 images for each year starting with 1962. I spread all the Wal-marts that opened that year over the 30 frames. To show the appearance of a Wal-mart, all I had to do was plot a large white dot over the small yellow dot for the appropriate ZIP code. I turned the 1380 images into an animation using MEncoder.

Here’s a version I found on YouTube, but I like the one on Kiki Tobes much better. There’s something about seeing it spread out into the black and slowly trace the outline of the country, as if the ocean is the only thing holding its hungry growth back. Click over and watch the Kiki Tobes version, it’s worth the minute it’ll cost you.

Link [Kiwi Tobes] via [Boing Boing]

EarthFirst Blog Week in Review: March 10th - 14th

It was another busy last week here at the EarthFirst blog. We covered samurai swords, expensive green washed handbags, big business green hijinks by GM and Wal-Mart, expensive gas, the green Pope, “clean coal” crap, and toilet paper. We’ve nailed down the design for the new template which we’ll be rolling out in a few weeks. It looks great and we’re really excited to show it to our readers. Happy reading!

Have you subscribed to our RSS Feed? Why the hell not!?! Get on it already.

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• The War on Iraq is Costing $4,000 a Second, or About $120,000 in the Time It Took to Write This Headline
• Global Warming Doesn’t Necessarily Mean It Gets Warmer Everywhere All The Time
• Rant: Shut the F*&% Up About High Gas Prices
• Animals vs. Humans: Humanity Gets Pwned
• The Vatican Declares that Polluting the Earth is Now a Sin
• The Three Ingredient Vegan Junk Food You’ve Probably Been Eating for Years
• EcoGeek Kills “Clean Coal” Ad and Calls Them Out for the Greenwash
• Florida Senator Pushing Bill to Require Restaurants to Have “Enough” Toilet Paper on Roll
• GM CEO Rick Wagoner: Vice Chairman Bob Lutz Doesn’t Speak for GM on Global Warming
• Doggie Style Commute: Ride the Bitch Cruiser to Not-Safe-for-Work
• Coal- Cheap. Abundant. Cheap.
• What is RSS and How Can It Make My Life Better?
• Want to Create Jobs? Invest in Education and Mass Transit
• A $360 Cardboard Bag Coated with Water-Resistant Spray with a Leather Handle is NOT Green
• The Friday Video Round Up: Will Ferrell, Big Angry Fat Guys, Al Gore, and the Hummer Hybrid
• Wal-Mart CEO is a Master of the Obvious: Our Company is Not Green
• Japan Steel Works- Builds 600 Ton Parts for Nuclear Power Plants and Samurai Swords
• Eco-Fail! HGTV’s Green Home Giveaway and The Yukon Hybrid

Wal-Mart CEO is a Master of the Obvious: Our Company is Not Green

I have to give credit to Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott Jr. for pointing out one of the more obvious things around- Wal-Mart is NOT Green. We’re talking about a corporation that has a bigger environmental impact than most nations and whose entire business model is built on making cheap crap on one side of the world and then shipping it to the other side to sell for a percent or two more. They are a gas guzzling, land eating, profits hungry corporate beast.

They have recently embraced the goal of becoming powered by 100% renewable energy and creating zero waste- a fine and noble goal with as much likelihood of happening as my plan of becoming all-knowing and all-powerful. It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, and I plan on living through my 90’s.

Lee made his comments owning up to Wal-Mart’s lack of true Green at the ECO:nomics conference recently held in California. I found the story over at the Wall Street Journals blog and nearly choked when I read the first sentence:

Lee Scott Jr. has earned a reputation as something of an environmental guru for actions he has taken over the past few years in getting Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to green up its act.

Show me someone who thinks Lee Scott Jr. is an environmental guru and I’ll show you someone who thinks George Bush is a great President. Lee appears to be a somewhat enlightened corporate suit at the head of one of the most sprawling companies on the face of the planet looking to use green to boost his margins. That’s fine- the world needs those enlightened suits- but only in the Bizarro World could the guy be called an “environmental guru”.

Here’s a quick three minute video of Mr. Scott’s interview:

Link [Wall Street Journal]

Photo credit: Flickr user Code Poet

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]