Green Breakfast Event
Wal-Mart is taking steps to become more sustainable. What are you doing?
As I mentioned before, we’re partnering up with the City of Arlington’s Green Team to encourage business sustainability efforts in Arlington and across North Texas. Part of this partnership includes the quarterly Green Team Networking Breakfasts. Wal-Mart hosted the first one last Friday and it turned out to be quite a success! Since Wal-Mart was such a gracious host, I’d like to pass along some of the high-points in their sustainability efforts.
Wal-Mart as a corporation has set three main goals to achieve sustainability.
1. Use 100% renewable energy
2. Create zero waste
3. Selling products that sustain our resources and the environment
In-store efforts to achieve these goals include offering plastic shopping bag recycling as well as promoting the use and sale of reusable cloth shopping bags. They aim to reduce plastic bag use by 33% from 2007 consumption levels by 2013, which, if the goal is met, would
• reduce plastic bag waste by 9 billion bags per year
• result in 290,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases reduced or avoided each year from existing stores
• eliminate Energy consumption equivalent to 678,000 barrels of oil not consumed.
They also offer a drop off point for plastic bottles to be recycled. To recycle these bottles along with the shipping and packaging materials there are in-store compactors which they use to compact all cardboard, plastic bottles, shrink wrap, plastic hangers, etc. into “super sandwich bales” which are sent to a recycling facility where they are sorted and recycled. The funds generated by each store’s recycling efforts are returned to that store as incentive to promote the recycling program.
From February 2008 to January 2009, this recycling program has diverted
• 182 million pounds of loose plastic
• 18.9 million pounds of plastic hangers
• 12.4 million pounds of office paper
• 1.3 million pounds of aluminum from going to landfills.
• Additionally, 25 billion pounds of cardboard has been sent to paper mills to be processed into new products like paper towels.
Wal-Mart has Greened Up its supplier stream, demanding products with less packaging and other waste. As an example of sustainable products, they only sell laundry detergent with concentrated formulas to decrease package size and reduce excess water usage. Reducing package size reduces the amount of material required to contain the product and reduces the amount of room the product occupies during shipment. This allows for more products to be shipped with fewer trucks reducing the impact of transporting the products to the stores.
They expect that over the next three years these efforts will
• save over 95 million pounds of plastic resin
• preserve more than 400 million gallons of water
• conserve over 520,000 gallons of diesel gasoline
• reduce more than 125 million pounds of cardboard used.
They have also created Wal-Mart brand CFL light bulbs to make energy efficient products accessible to people of all size budgets. To conserve energy, they have installed a new kind of door for the dairy storage area. The roll down door is timed to shut after being open only 30 seconds to reduce the amount of energy required to chill the dairy section.
All of these efforts and more are outlined in the Wal-Mart Sustainability website. Check out more of the efforts they’re making and consider the things you can do too.
