The Green Skeptic: Wal-Mart

Showing posts with label Wal-Mart. Show all posts

22 July 2009

Where's the Beef: Will Banning Amazon Beef Doom the Rainfrorest?

Veteran conservationist David Cleary knows what's critical for protecting the Amazon: beef.

Cleary, the director of conservation strategies in South America for The Nature Conservancy, lived in the Amazon for over a decade and he knows that "the most important driver of deforestation in the Amazon is ranching, with pasture having replaced more than 80 percent of the Brazilian Amazon cleared since reliable satellite records began, in the early 1980s."

As Cleary writes in his Cool Green Science blog post this week, "There are good reasons why ranching thrives in the Amazon: land is free or cheap in most of it, cattle need minimal care, and they can walk to market."

But efforts to green the beef supply chain always fell short, Cleary says, until last month when "Friends of the Earth in Brazil and Greenpeace in Europe came out with separate reports detailing the role of the beef industry in driving Amazon deforestation. There was a media firestorm. Within days, all the major Brazilian supermarket chains (Carrefour and Walmart among them) announced new policies banning the purchase of meat linked to deforestation in the Amazon."

Cleary contends that while this is a milestone, it could quickly turn into a millstone if the market for Amazon beef shifts elsewhere.

"The problem with trying to inject conservation into commodity markets is that they’re global," writes Cleary. "The danger with the Greenpeace/Friends of the Earth approach is that it cuts off access to markets that could change the behavior of producers and influence them to stop deforesting."

The trick, Cleary argues is "getting beef markets to work in a way that brings deforestation down, instead of simply switching the markets and consumers that drive it."

Read more at Cool Green Science

(Image: Smoke from burning tropical forest in Para state, Brazil. Credit: leoffreitas through a Creative Commons license.)

14 July 2009

The Wal*Mart Game-Changer: How Green is Your Sustainability?

Image via Wikipedia

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if anyone can make the transition to the new green economy work, it is Wal-Mart.

Oh, some argue that they are the evil empire, with their huge building footprint and their aisles upon aisles of cheap, sometimes useless stuff.

Others will ask, why don't they treat their workers better or their small business competition?

But no one can argue that the latest move by the bargain-dealing superstore isn't a game-changer: Wal-Mart is launching a Sustainability Index.

A Sustainability Index? That's right. Wal-Mart plans to track and rate the life-cycle of every product it sells in its stores and list the results on the shelf.

According to an article by Marc Gunther on Slate's The Big Money, Wal-Mart has been working with a consortium of consumer-goods manufacturers and universities to develop this index.

Wal-Mart's new CEO Mike Duke will unveil the Index this Thursday, July 16, at the company’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Measuring sustainability all up and down a product's chain is tough, especially if you factor in "people and communities" to the index, as Gunther reports is Wal-Mart's intention. But if anyone can do it the Bentonville Behemoth is probably up to the task.

Kudos to Wal-Mart for taking this next step. Let's hope it works and really changes the game.

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11 November 2008

More On What's Next for the New Green Economy

I've been thinking more about last week's panel discussion, "What's Next for the Green Economy?"

A few of the questions made me think about President-elect Obama and what he'll be facing when he takes office in January.

So I thought I'd try to answer some of the questions here and, in a future post, I'll offer my two cents to Mr. Obama.

Will a Green Economy rebound faster from financial turmoil?

I think it will, if only because the concerns that are driving the green wave are not going away anytime soon: dependence on foreign oil, stemming climate change, and high fuel prices.

(On the last point, while price per barrel is down in the mid-60s today; it averages out around $109 per barrel for the year. As energy analyst Gregor MacDonald points out in this post, the average price over time is more important for commodities like oil.)

Will consumers stick with Green during tough times?

Tough one. Depends upon how hard hit they are where they keep their wallets. The good news is, companies like Wal-Mart have already made commitments to go green and are making money at it.

It will be tough to maintain momentum if the costs of greener goods don't come down or if manufacturers stick to luxury green items. Overall, however, there are gains in green stuff like organic foods and some consumer goods, such as Energy Star-rated appliances. (TVs should see a bump-up, with the changes coming in the new year concerning the switch to digital signals.)

What is the next administration really facing that's not being talked about in the media?

How to pay for the huge transformation from old, dying economy to new green economy. You can't nickel and dime your way there, but with the War in Iraq (and Afghanistan) still going on and $700B bailout of banks and potentially more for automakers. Where ya gonna get the money?

Does America need a energy technology bubble just like the information technology bubble?

Yes. Bubbles can be good. As author of Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, has written, "the excitement of a new technology interacts with some of the more unstable components of America's character—boundless optimism, a tendency toward entrepreneurship, a tolerance of creative destruction, and greed—to produce a kind of mania."

We could use a little of that boundless optimism today. Dontcha' think?

When the bubble bursts, we'll be left with a new green infrastructure that will keep the new green economy going.

And it may just save our assets.

The Green Skeptic