Wal-Mart Becomes “Green Umpire” with its Sustainability Index
Published: 27 July 2009
Category: Packaging CONCERNS, Sustainability
“The Big Money” reports Wal-Mart has been working quietly on a “sustainability index,” an ambitious, comprehensive and complex plan to measure the sustainability of every product it sells. Wal-Mart intends to announce the sustainability index at a meeting on Thursday, July 16, at its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to which hundreds of suppliers, academics, environmentalists, and government officials have been invited. For the index to work, consumer-goods makers will need to understand the origins of everything they put into their products and assess sustainability in four broad categories: energy and greenhouse gas emissions, materials, natural resources, and people and communities, which will attempt to measure social impacts.