Kudos to both Adam Werbach and Hunter Lovins & Paul Shelton for their recent actions in working with Wal-Mart.

Werbach for not backing down to the corporate evil empire with his recommendations for green power, carbon offsets and zero waste policies. Can you imagine a day when there will be no dumpsters or landfill waste for Wal-Mart? I can. (I was not able to find accurate figures on the amount of landfill waste Wal-Mart is currently responsible for generating…)
Note: organicARCHITECT sponsored Werbach for his landmark Death of Environmentalism speech at The Commonwealth Club in December 2004.

Lovins & Sheldon for initially rejecting Wal-Mart in the first place because they “didn’t believe the corporation was serious. Their whole business model is basically parasitic.” Can you blame them?
Note: Lovins and Sheldon also run the wonderful Presidio Green MBA School of Business.

After several lame, half-hearted attempts to green up their image, Wal-Mart does not have a great record. I will admit, though, that these recent activities do seem more focused and serious. Wal-Mart has become the largest purchaser of organic cotton in the world. Wal-Mart has become the biggest vendor of organic milk, in a market where demand is already 20 percent higher than supply.

But can anything done with the scale they are doing things be good in the end?

“The worst treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason…”
- t.s. eliot

Read the story in the San Francisco Bay Guardian

Joel Makower is a bit of a rareity in sustainability: he is the real deal. An expert in green business, clean energy and climate change, he is a professional walking advisory board. He is the executive editor of GreenBiz.com and its sister sites, ClimateBiz.comLINK and GreenerBuildings.com, where I write my monthly column.

His blog is a regular visit for me, as it is the first place to find the most cutting edge information on green business.

TreeHugger interviews him, asking about eco-myths, electric cars and a green economy:

The TH Interview: Joel Makower on the Green Economy, Electric Sports Cars, and the World’s Biggest Eco-Myth

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest grocer, has decided to take organic food seriously. Beginning later this year, Wal-Mart plans to roll out a complete selection of organic foods – certified to have been grown without pesticides – in its nearly 4,000 stores.

The company says it will price all this organic food at only 10 percent more than the conventional kind. Organic food will soon be available to the tens of millions of Americans who now cannot afford it. That is the good news.

The bad news? Wal-Mart is notorious for exploiting every loophole, externalizing every cost, and treating everyone it deals with badly. Will they extort the organic farmers as they do the other manufacturers?

Full Story

There is a tendency to attack large corporations when they start talking about how they are going to go green. Any why not? Most of this is just for easy headlines and PR. Look at Exxon or Ford (of 5 years ago). I tend to think of large companies as large ships, not good at changing course so quickly. Give them a chance, at least until it appears to be just talk.

Then again, there are companies who actually walk the walk: like Nike, Toyota and Ford (of today).

Of course, all of this is inherently flawed. Their business model still revolves around the consumption of goods and the selling of more stuff for our landfills.

Wal-Mart started talking about GREEN a few years ago when they realized how they can save MONEY by having energy efficient buildings. It quickly became apparent that anything not having a return on their investment, say the use of non-toxic paints, quickly was ignored. After all, Wal-Mart does not actually CARE about our health, just selling more and lowering their expenses.

Mark Morford’s article today sums it up best:
Seems Wal-Mart has realized one vital maxim that so many fundamentalist right-wing capitalist GOPers have so far failed to grasp: The apocalypse is just really bad for business.
and he goes on to say:
The reason Wal-Mart will double the fuel efficiency of their huge truck fleet within a decade? Not to save the air, but to save $300 million in fuel costs per year… and also to help lessen the impact of global warming, which is indirectly causing more violent weather, which in turn endangers production and delivery and Wal-Mart’s ability to, well, sell more crap. Ah, capitalism.

And look at the lovely seaside town of Hercules, here in the Bay Area and their successful fight to kick Wal-Mart out of town.

No matter how green Wal-Mart makes their buildings, it does not change their main strategy, to destroy the Mom & Pop local stores that give each town character. Paying a lower wage to a worker in China is still not sustainable, even if the goods they produce are made of corn-based plastic.

Is Walmart really going green?

For many enviros, the name “Wal-Mart” has always triggered a shudder. The world’s biggest retailer has been charged with exacerbating suburban sprawl, burning massive quantities of oil, producing mountains of packaging waste, and encouraging gratuitous consumption. (And those are just the environmental complaints.)

But it’s precisely Wal-Mart’s size and reach that could make it a powerful force for good for the planet…

FULL STORY

AND ON THE OTHER HAND:
Umbra’s great reponse to Why is Wal-Mart evil?