Business and Industry

Many businesses and industries are changing, to become genuinely green in their practices and products. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) serves as an interesting case study in evolving priorities and increasing environmental responsibility on the company’s “Road to Sustainability.”

For decades, Wal-Mart has been a major part of the problem. Wal-Mart encouraged mass-market consumption with abandon on a staggering scale. In addition, with its tunnel-vision focus on lowest-cost goods, Wal-Mart purchased products from factories in countries with little or no environmental protection. By aggressively seeking market domination, Wal-Mart became the largest retailer in the world, now generating about a third of a trillion dollars in revenues annually. But Wal-Mart’s priorities are changing.

With 175 million customers each week, and a supply chain of 60,000 suppliers worldwide, Wal-Mart can single-handedly bring economic decisions into alignment with environmental responsibility on a grand scale. Consider this:

Wal-Mart is investing $500 million in sustainability projects, including working with suppliers to reduce excess packaging and save energy.

Wal-Mart is the already the world’s biggest seller of organic milk and the biggest buyer of organic cotton.

Wal-Mart has opened two green stores (in Texas and Colorado), where it is experimenting with alternative building materials, low-power lighting systems, alternative energy, intensive recycling, and other green business practices that can be applied to some or all of Wal-Mart’s 6,600 big-box stores.

If Wal-Mart can transform its corporate value-system to meaningfully embrace sustainability, why can’t every business and industry?

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