Wal-Mart and the Business Case for Green

Walmart’s effort to green its stores, trucking fleet, products, and supply chain, alternately dismissed from the left as window dressing and from the right as a costly distraction, has accomplished something that 40 years of environmental activism and regulation never managed: It moved sustainability from the fringe to the forefront of business concerns.... Read my full article at Grist.org

The point of my piece is not to serve as a counterpoint to the recent series of stories at Grist by Stacy Mitchell -- who found the specifics of Wal-Mart sustainability projects wanting, to say the least -- but to point out that the real value of having such a mega-company trying to become greener, however imperfect those efforts may be, is that it drags the rest of the big business world along with it. Wal-Mart has used the same clout with which it has driven prices down and crushed competitors to do something shockingly different: mainstream sustainability. I have no interest in either lionizing or lambasting Wal-Mart on this score; it's simply a fact, and one that utterly destroys the arguments of the drill-baby-drill crowd by showing that sustainable and planet-friendly choices help America compete and prosper.

Messy Sustainability is Better Than None

The sustainability success story continues to percolate through the business world, demonstrating the vitality and value of green initiatives. BSR's Melanie Janin writes at GreenBiz.com about companies willing to further their efforts to become greener by publicly airing their dirty environmental laundry along with their accomplishments. Becoming more sustainable is a messy business, but contrary to some of the more unfortunate rhetoric in Washington, the payoff is huge, particularly in a tough economy.

I'll be joining Janin at BSR's annual conference in San Francisco in November to discuss Force of Nature and the big-business sustainability story.

Why You Should Care About Wal-Mart's Greener Biz - LAT OpEd

If you care about green, it's hard not to view these as the worst of times, marked by looming climate, water and energy crises, vanishing fisheries, mile-a-minute deforestation — the list is numbingly endless. In response, we have a largely apathetic public, an environmental lobby rendered toothless by said apathy, a political left and center paralyzed by fear that protecting the planet might hurt the economy, and a political right that's never been more virulently opposed to all things green as job-killing, business-bashing burdens and boondoggles.

But then there's ... Wal-Mart.

Read on at LATimes.com...

Page 99

Ford Madox Ford once asserted: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."

Marshal Zeringue, author, playwright and head honcho at the Campaign for the American Reader, turned Ford's quip into an actual test. So when Marshal asks if you'd like to run your book through the Page 99 test, a mad scramble ensues to see what accident of typography and layout had put on that particular page, before you email back and say, sure!

Here's the Page 99 test for Force of Nature, which, as it happens, concerns a pivotal moment in 2005 when Wal-Mart, Hurricane Katrina, and a fledgling green initiative at the king of the big box stores  all collided --with surprising results.

Force of Nature Media

Media Update III: Wal-Mart: Force of Nature or Greenwashing? A discussion at the Commonwealth Club's ClimateOne program in San Francisco.

Media Update II: How Wal-Mart won over a Sierra Club President. Fortune Magazine excerpts Force of Nature.

Media Update: Can Going Green Make Wal-Mart Cool? Kerry A. Dolan writes at Forbes that Force of Nature "spins a compelling tale."


I'm just back from the San Francisco leg of the Force of Nature book tour, following this review in the New York Times. Reviewer Bryan Burrough writes:

The idea that “going green” could actually be profitable, a notion put forth by economists as long as 20 years ago, remains a source of skepticism in some quarters. If you still need convincing, pick up Edward Humes’s excellent new book, “Force of Nature” (Harper Business, 265 pages, $27.99), the story of how the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, came to go green. I’ll wager that you won’t look at sustainability issues quite the same way again. It certainly opened my eyes.

...Mr. Humes does here what the very best business books do. He finds a good story to help illuminate an issue of surpassing importance.... Mr. Humes’s prose is almost flawless, lean and clear, egoless and spare. He doesn’t deify or demonize Wal-Mart or any of the characters; in fact, he says Wal-Mart’s very business model is probably unsustainable. This is first-rate work — both by the author and by Wal-Mart itself.

Wal-Mart Meets the River Guide

When I first met Jib Ellison, I had no inkling I had found my next book. Mainly, I felt skeptical about this former river guide turned sustainability consultant who lived off the grid north of San Francisco and endeavored to persuade big, mainstream companies like Wal-Mart to go green.

Seriously -- Wal-Mart?

But then I learned more about Ellison, an affable forty-something outdoorsman-philosopher whose first venture brought Soviet and American delegations together on wild rivers in both countries -- in the midst of the Cold War. Diplomacy and friendships sprang out of the bonds that inevitably develop when people row together down hair-raising rapids.

Now Ellison engaged in an entirely different kind of diplomacy, bringing corporate titans and environmentalists together so they, too, can focus on their common ground -- and how protecting the planet can actually be the greatest business opportunity of the century.

The river guide can rattle off one example after another of freshly converted business leaders pursuing the least polluting, least wasteful, and least energy-hogging practices.  Why do companies such as Wal-Mart do this? Because they have realized (with Ellison's help) that this isn't just the most planet-friendly way of doing business. It also can be the most profitable way of doing business.

Read synopsis and early reviews of Force of Nature here. Check out reader reviews from Amazon's Vine Program here.

Here’s a prime example of what’s been going on: It began with a toy truck, which Wal-Mart sold by the million.
Encouraged by Ellison to take some baby steps toward greater sustainability, Wal-Mart shaved a few inches off the cardboard packaging of its toy fleet. Then they did the math: The move saved 4,000 trees -- good for the planet, obviously. But it brought other consequences, too: Smaller packages required 497 fewer shipping containers to pack and a million fewer barrels of oil to move the products from factory to warehouse to store. That led to $2.4 million in savings for the retailer within a year. Wal-Mart would have to sell $60 million in toys to earn that same amount. 

That was just one product, but it seemed to light a fire within Wal-Mart 's former CEO, H. Lee Scott, to uncover other missed opportunities to be both sustainable and profitable. Overcoming his own skepticism, Scott gave the green light to keep going green, and allowed Ellison to open the normally secretive company to outsiders with fresh ideas -- even the former president of the Sierra Club, who once called Wal-Mart "the devil."

What happens when a Wal-Mart -- or American dairy farmers or the global fashion industry, both of which are following Wal-Mart's lead -- start looking for green choices throughout their businesses because it serves the bottom line? The potential is mind-boggling, and represents one of the most hopeful green trends today.

The unlikely partnership of a river guide and a CEO has helped set in motion what could be the next industrial revolution -- the story I explore in my new book, Force of Nature.  I hope you'll find it as intriguing and important a tale as I did.