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.
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.
