More than a decade after the Nike scandals of the late 1990s exposed terrible working conditions in the Asian factories where most of our stuff is made, has anything changed? To be sure, in the years since, most US brands — not just footwear and apparel companies like Nike, Timberland and Gap, but corporate giants like GE and Walmart — have assumed responsibility for human rights and environmental problems throughout their supply chains. But are conditions any better for the workers?

Those questions are front-page news these days, literally, in The New York Times, which has published two long and extraordinary stories about Apple and its supply chain in China. [See How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work and especially In China, Human Costs are built into an IPad.] The Apple-in-China story is also brought to life by Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, a lively, provocative episode of public radio’s This American Life, in which an actor-turned-reporter  named Mike Daisey investigates conditions at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. Together this reporting paints a shameful picture of harsh and unsafe working conditions at Apple suppliers: sometimes deadly safety issues, chemicals that scar people’s hands, 60-hour weeks, long stretches of work with no breaks, a rash of worker suicides, etc. To get some perspective, I spoke with Dan Viederman, the executive director of Verite, a nonprofit that helps companies build more humane and sustainable supply chains, and I’ve been reading my friend Adam Lashinsky’s excellent new book, Inside Apple.

Foxconn offers medical care on its campuses

For starters, let’s be clear: This is not an Apple problem. The focus of both The Times’ reporting and Mike Daisey’s story is Foxconn, which is said to be China’s biggest private employer and may be the world’s largest manufacturing company. It employs 1.2 million people (!) and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, for customers including Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung, according to The Times. Part of a company called Hon Hai that is headquartered in Taiwan, Foxconn operates not just in Asia, but in the Czech Republic, Mexico and Brazil. It publishes a corporate social responsibility report and has US-based employees in Houston and Austin, TX.  Most Americans, of course, have never heard of Foxconn although they probably own something that was made by the company.

Nor is the problem of harsh, unsafe working conditions limited to Foxconn or even the electronics industry. Problems abound in the apparel and toy industries, too, as well as in mining, farming, fishing and construction. [See Walmart: A Bully Benefactor at Fortune.com for my story about Walmart's work to prevent  child labor on cotton farms in Uzbekistan]. Last summer, Nike admitted that “nearly two-thirds of the 168 factories making Converse products fail to meet Nike’s standards for contract manufacturers,” according to this story by Good Guide’s Dara O’Rourke, who as a graduate student working in Vietnam in 1997 turned a spotlight on Nike’s use of child labor.  In its most recent corporate-responsibility report, Gap says  that between 10 and 25% of its suppliers in south China don’t comply with child labor laws, don’t pay overtime as required and don’t provide one day off each week. I turned to Gap’s report not because they are a laggard but because, to their credit, they are a leader when it comes to being open about where their factory monitoring efforts are falling shorts. Other companies don’t say nearly as much about where their stuff is made, or how. The factories themselves are often walled off from NGOs and journalists. The result is that, for better or worse, most of our stuff is made in faraway places by people who are invisible to us. Can you find Shenzhen, a city of 14 million people (bigger than New York!) and the world’s manufacturing hub, on a map?

Apple CEO Tim Cook

As best as I can tell, Apple is no worse than most other companies when it comes to protecting the rights of workers in its factories. It may be better. In its sixth annual Supplier Responsibility Report released last month, Apple disclosed the names of its suppliers for the first time–but not the location of their factories. The company also became the first electronics firm to join the Fair Labor Association, a nonprofit group that works to improve conditions for workers. (Its other clients include Nike.) In an email to employees, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook wrote: “The FLA’s auditing team will have direct access to our supply chain and they will report their findings independently on their website.” They don’t, however, tie violations to particular factories.

In its report, Apple also said that it

dedicated additional resources to protecting the rights of workers who move from their home country to work in factories in another country. Many of these immigrants are charged exorbitant fees that drive them into debt, an industrywide problem that Apple discovered in 2008 and that we classify as involuntary labor. In 2010, we continued our search for these violations, auditing all of our production suppliers in Taiwan and many in Malaysia and Singapore. As a result of Apple’s audits and rigorous standards,
foreign workers have been reimbursed $3.4 million in recruitment fee overcharges since 2008.

This is significant because it’s a rare example of a US brand putting money in the pockets of overseas workers. “On the migrant labor issue, Apple is absolutely a leader,” says Dan Viederman of Verite. [Disclosure: Verite has worked with Apple and my wife, Karen Schneider, is a board member of  Verite.] Others see Apple differently. A consultant for BSR (also know as Business for Social Responsibility) who declined to be identified told The Times that Apple refused to push Foxconn to try out a program where workers could have access to private “hotlines” to report abusive conditions.

The more fundamental problem is that Apple’s reporting doesn’t tell you much about what impact the company is having. Cook’s email, for example, says that Apple’s

Supplier Responsibility team led more than 200 audits at facilities throughout our supply chain last year. These audits make sure [emphasis added] that working conditions are safe and just..

But othey don’t. Suppliers are notorious for faking pay records and gaming the inspectors. And Apple’s track record makes clear that conditions are not safe and just.

Cook also boasts that Apple offers free continuing education programs at  factories in China, saying that “more than 60,000 workers have enrolled in classes to learn business, entrepreneurial skills or English.” But are they earning more money? Working fewer hours? Safer?

Dan Viederman

See the problem here? Apple and other companies are measuring their actions, and not their impact. There’s a big difference between the two.  It’s reason why we don’t know whether the people who make the iPad are better or worse off than those who make an HP printer or a Microsoft X-Box. “Companies report on their activities – audits conducted, training delivered – but don’t tell us what impact that effort has achieved for workers,” Dan says. “As a result, while companies are getting better at reporting on their activities, we don’t have a meaningful way to compare one company to another.” We’d know more if companies reported on the wages that workers are paid, the number of workplace injuries, turnover rates, environmental discharges and the like.

Those who follow these issues also tell me that workplace issues are not part of procurement at most companies. If suppliers had  to demonstrate that they provide ethical workplaces as a condition of doing business with a big US brand, companies might avoid embarrassment–and more important, make a difference in the lives of their workers.

Nicholas Kristof

Having said that, it’s worth remembering that globalization and the manufacturing jobs it has brought to Shenzhen have on balance been good for China and its people. Workers line up for jobs at Foxconn, as the Atlantic reported last week. No less a crusader for the rights of the global poor than Nicholas Kristof has said as much, most famously in a 2000 Times Magazine article called Two Cheers for Sweatshops.

More recently, Kristof, who lived in China, told This American Life that industrialization has

created massive employment opportunities, especially for young women, who frankly didn’t have a lot of alternatives. That tended to give women more clout within families, within the community….for many Chinese, the grimness of factories like Foxconn was better than the grimness of rice paddies.

If you’d prefer the opinion of a Nobel Prize-winning economist, here’s Paul Krugman, writing in Slate, back in 1997:

While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

It is not an edifying spectacle, but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful, but nonetheless significantly better.

What’s more, competition for workers — and the very beginnings of a labor movement — has also begun to  improve conditions in China’s factories. To retain workers, owners are said to be improving wages, working conditions and living conditions, albeit slowly.

But still.

My MacBookPro costs $1299.  My iPad2 retails for $499. I don’t even know how much my iPhone costs, and I don’t want to think about how many iPods, Nanos or shuffles I’ve bought for my family over the years. By selling premium-priced products and generating high margins, Apple was the US’s most valuable company–worth more than ExxonMobil, Microsoft and IBM, last time I checked. It’s holding $97 billion in cash and short-term securities.

Simple fairness dictates that more of that wealth should be shared with the workers in China who are making Apple products.

Have consumers ever been more powerful than they are today?

A Facebook posting led thousands of people to move money out of big banks and into credit unions. When customers revolted, Verizon dropped plans to charge a $2 “convenience fee” to pay bills online. A petition at change.org led to Bank of America back off a scheme to charge customers for using their debit cards.

“It’s a great time to be a citizen,” says Brent Schulkin. “It’s a really bad time to be a failed institution.”

Schulkin, who is 31, is the founder of Carrotmob, a startup that aims to use the power of consumers to do good. Instead of boycotting or protesting companies for missteps (or downright bad behavior),  Carrotmob organizes campaigns in which people offer to spend their money to support a business, and in return the business agrees to take an action that the people care about. It’s the opposite of a boycott, and it’s called Carrotmob (not to be confused with the comedian Carrot Top) because it uses a “carrot” instead of a “stick” to spark change.

Carrotmob in Sydney, Australia

You can think of Carrotmob as another way to drive sustainability by using social media. The idea has been kicking around Schulkin’s head since 2003 when he was an undergrad at Stanford. As it evolves, it is likely to look more like  Groupon (which uses the power of collective purchasing to drive discounts) or Kickstarter (where people can come together to raise money to support a project) while tapping into some of the frustrations that energized OccupyWallStreet.

“There are a huge number of people today who look at the machinery that makes our society work, and they think it’s broken,” Schulkin says, and he’s hope to channel their energy into fixing it.

The idea that consumers can influence companies with their pocketbooks isn’t new, of course. My friend Joel Makower, the founder of GreenBiz, wrote a book called The Green Consumer back in 1989. (You can buy it for a penny on Amazon.) And socially conscious consumers helped build brands like Newman’s Own and Ben & Jerry’s. even today, though, green consumers are not well-organized, or connected to one another. You may buy Seventh Generation laundry detergent or Timberland boots but it’s not clear what difference, if any, you have made by doing so.

This is Brent Schulkin of Carrotmob

Schulkin got Carrotmob going four years ago by organizing his friends and their friends to support a liquor store in the Mission district of San Francisco. They spent $9,000 in a single day on “beer and popsicles,” had a party afterwards and in return the owner did an energy retrofit on the store. They made a video of that first campaign and the idea spread, as good ideas often do on the net.

Since then, more than 175 Carrotmobs organized by grass-roots groups around the world, including France (“Invasion des Carrottes a Rennes”), Germany (“Erster Freiburger Carrotmob”) and Finland (“Porkannamafia!”, my personal favorite). Most have focused on energy and climate issues because retailers can be persuaded to invest in energy efficiency or clean power.

This is Carrot Top

These grass-roots efforts will continue, Schulkin says, mostly because they run themselves: “It’s their energy, their ideas, their passion. I just got an email from Estonia.”

The next step–and here is where things can get interesting and complicated–will involve harnessing all that buying power to support action by a big company or brand.

“What does it look like if we get millions of people into a network and drive millions of dollars in sales to a big company?” Schulkin asks.

This raises as many questions as it answers. How can Carrotmob insure that the quid for their quo is real? Who decides which companies or products are most deserving? And how does the venture govern and sustain itself?

Schulkin told me at the GreenBiz Forum in New York last week that Carrotmob is a work in progress, mostly supported by donations and sweat equity. He’s got bigger things in mind. The FAQ’s on the Carrotmob website point to a possible business model:

The primary model we are going to pursue will work like this: With our team and our technology we will help facilitate campaigns, and then we will charge businesses a small fee based on how much money the mob collectively spends. This fee will vary based on the circumstances of the campaign, but in general we think it’s the most sensible revenue model for us to pursue.

This makes Carrotmob sound a bit like Groupon, except that instead of a discount, its buyers get an environmental or social payback. Trust becomes a key factor at that point: consumers will have to trust Carrotmob and trust (or verify) that the company is, in fact, taking an action it would not otherwise do. Those are big hurdles. If Carrotmob can overcome them, it could become a real force for change.

This story was first published at GreenBiz.com, where I’m a senior writer.

I spent the day today at the GreenBiz Forum 12 in New York. I’m a senior writer at GreenBiz, which does a great job producing events. I interviewed Dan Hendrix, the CEO of Interface, who’s picking up where the company’s legendary and visionary founder, Ray Anderson, left off; more here. And I wrote about Israel Ganot, the co-founder and CEO of Gazelle, a fast-growing startup that recycles electronics. Please read this story if, like many of us, you don’t know what to do with your old gadgets. I first covered Gazelle back in 2009. [See Cash for (electronic) clunkers.]

Here’s how the story begins:

Think, for a moment, about that one place in your house where you don’t like to go.

That closet. The garage. In my house, it’s the attic. Ugh.

The place where you put stuff you no longer want or need.

“How much is enough?” asks Israel Ganot.

Ganot, who is the president, co-founder and CEO of Gazelle, spoke today at the GreenBiz Forum 12 in New York. He has a way to help you de-clutter your home, at least when it comes to electronics. Gazelle buys back cell phones, laptops and other electronics, offers free shipping and then pays you for them. Gazelle makes money by reselling the used goods in the U.S. or abroad. What it can’t resell, it recycles.

“We give new life to old gadgets that still have value,” he says.

You can read the rest here.

You can rent this penthouse in Rio for $258/night on AirBnB

You hear a lot these days about the sharing economy and collaborative consumption, especially if you spend time in northern California. I spent last week in San Francisco, where people told me about AirBnB, which allows people to share their homes or apartments with visitors, RelayRides,  Share My Ride and getaround, which allow people to rent their cars for a few hours or days, and ThredUp, where parents buy, sell and share children’s clothes, toys and books. Meantime, Prosper.com and Lending Club connect people who want to lend money with those who want to borrow. With peer-to-peer lending, who needs Citi or Bank of America?

Last year, Fast Company published a thoughtful and well-reported overview of the sharing economy by Danielle Sacks under the headline: “Thanks to the social web, you can now share anything with anyone anywhere in the world. Is this the end of hyperconsumption?” More than 3 million people from 235 countries have “couch-surfed,” she reported, and more than 2.2 million bike-sharing trips are taken each month.

Many sharing websites, like Freecycle and Couch Surfing, are nonprofits. Seattle and Berkeley have tool libraries, where people can borrow a lawn mower, power saw or drill. But other sharing ventures are business. Some analysts expect the sharing economy to generate real money, Fast Company reported:

Gartner Group researchers estimate that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion by 2013. Frost & Sullivan projects that car-sharing revenues in North America alone will hit $3.3 billion by 2016.

I’ve always liked the idea of sharing–hey, I paid attention back in kindergarten–because of its obvious environmental benefits: The more we share, the less stuff we need to own. But I’ve been skeptical of the claim that the sharing economy would end–or even slow down–hyperconsumption. My week in San Francisco made me less of a skeptic. This idea just might spread.

Partly I’ve changed my thinking because of my own experience. For the first time, I stayed in an apartment that I found through AirBnB. Because I planned to spend six days in San Francisco, staying in a downtown hotel struck me as unappealing. I liked the idea of exploring a neighborhood, making my own breakfast and saving a few dollars. So I found a studio in Potrero Hill for $140/night that I rented from a woman named Kepa Askenasy.  I chose it in  part because Kepa was rated a “SuperHost” by Air BnB and had about 70 favorable reviews from renters on the site. It’s the top floor unit, below.

My digs in San Francisco

I felt some trepidation as I boarded the plane for SFO–this wasn’t as predictable as staying at a Marriott, or at one of the Joie de Vivre hotels in SF, which I like a lot–but everything worked out really well. The apartment was small but comfortable, and Kepa kindly provided maps, neighborhood guides and her own advice on local dining and shopping.  I explored Potrero Hill, enjoyed a long walk to downtown for one meeting, got around on buses and the Muni,  went for a run with my pal Adam Lashinsky (buy his new book!) who leaves nearby and hung out at Farley’s, the local coffee shop.

The peer reviews on AirBnB took a lot of risk out of the transaction, for Kepa and me. She got paid in advance. I was reassured by her ratings. Afterwards, we rated one another, to guide future renters and lessors. She told me by email:

Airbnb emphasizes customer service, and accountability on both sides of the equation (host/ guest) through their transparent review process. It’s been exceptionally easy to handle the transactions. My guests seem to be happy with their side of the deal too.

Should Marriott and Hilton be worried by AirBnB? Probably not, but it’s not going to help their business.

Later in the week, I had lunch with Beth Trask of Environmental Defense Fund who told me that she’s renovating a home in Berkeley. And, yes, when she needs tools, she visits the tool library. She told me:

The Berkeley tool library is a real community gem.  I’ve borrowed everything from rakes and hammers to drain snakes, sanders and power tools.   The crusty old guys who run it love to tease me — since I never know the right names for the tools I’m looking for and they usually have to explain them to me – but they always help me out.  I’ve saved so much money and time, and have learned a lot about tools along the way.

On a visit with Net Impact, a great organization of MBAs, young professionals and college students who want to use the power of business to change the world for the better, several young staffers told me that they thought the sharing economy was a real phenomenon among younger people. Liz Maw, the executive director, was planning to rent a car the following day from getaround, but was stymied by a couple of glitches. But others in the group had used car sharing services, which provide peer reviews as well as insurance. Most cars, it turns out, sit around as much as 90% of the time.

I’d readily use AirBnB again, and I’m prepared to try car sharing. I’ve been using Freecyle for years [see my 2007 Fortune.com column, The amazing Freecycle story]. It strikes me that free or government-backed sharing programs, like Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., function as gateway drugs for people who have forgotten the lessons they learned in kindergarten. They can move from there to Zipcar and from there to sharing their own car or apartment, and borrowing from others.

Lisa Gansky, an entrepreneur and author of a book called The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, is the leading evangelist for the sharing economy. In a manifesto called Six Reasons Why the Sharing Society (aka the Mesh) Will Trump the Ownership Society [PDF, download], she has this to say about the environmental advantages of sharing:

Barring some miracle in space, there’s only one planet for us to inhabit. And by mid-century, roughly three billion more people will join us. With this math, it’s not hard to predict that businesses that figure out more efficient ways to use the earth’s resources will thrive. Also, urban areas will inevitably become more densely populated, which really favors the sharing economy. If you’ve got more people in a neighborhood, it’s easier to increase the number of bikes, tools, local farmers markets or clothing swaps you can offer. You can also make your offers more convenient—more shared cars in the lot or on a nearby street. Density deepens community and creates demand for shared products and services. Owning a car outright, on the other hand, becomes a bigger and bigger expense and burden to maintain and park.

Very cool.

Do you think the sharing economy threatens business as usual?

Pity the much-maligned plastic bag.

Plastic bags are being banned or taxed in cities and counties across America–just this week in Seattle, before that in San Francisco, Portland and Washington, D.C.  Beginning in January, Montgomery County, MD, where I live, will impose a five-cent charge for carryout bags at all retail stores. Like most of my neighbors (median household income in the county tops $92,000) I can afford the extra nickel.

But I’m not persuaded that plastic bag bans or taxes makes sense. Here’s why.

They’re not  based on science. Independent studies show that plastic bags are environmentally preferable to paper. Other suggest that, when they are reused, they are preferable to the reusable plastic or cloth sacks that many of us tote around.

Some of the arguments put forth for the bans don’t hold up. That plastic waste waste in the oceans you’ve probably read about? No, it’s not the size of Texas. Nor is it made of plastic bags.

Getting rid carryout bags won’t lead to a long-term solution to the problem of plastic waste. Maybe instead of banning or taxing bags, we should be recycling them. That’s the argument being put forth by a company called Hilex Poly, which will recycle tens of millions of pounds of plastic bags, sacks and wraps this year, and would like to do more.

You may disagree but after digging into this subject for a while, I’m certain about only one thing: It’s complicated.

The arguments for plastic bag bans or taxes are, by now, familiar.  The Montgomery County carryout bag law  “is designed to improve our environment by cutting down plastic bags—a significant source of litter—which pollute our streets, streams, and playgrounds, and harm property values.” Econ 101 tells you that charging 5 cents for plastic bags creates an incentive for people to use fewer of them, and carry reusable bags instead. Proceeds go to “programs that fight litter and provide stormwater pollution control.”

Bill Hickman, who leads the Rise Above Plastics campaign at the Surfrider Foundation, an advocacy group, told me by phone: “We’re trying to stop the plastic impact on the marine environment. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade in our lifetime…Anything, single use, at the end of the day has negative effects on our environment.”

All true, but…

Studies say that plastic bags have a lighter environmental footprint than paper, and in some cases are preferable to reusable bags. A thorough life cycle analysis done in the UK by the government’s environment agency in 2006 (download, PDF, here) found that HDPE (high-density polyethylene, the typical lightweight plastic bags) are superior to paper because they require less energy and far less water to make and take up less space in landfill. Comparing them to reusable non woven polypropylene (PP) bags–the typical reusable bag, made in China, and sold by grocers–the study found that their impacts depend upon the number of times that plastic bags are reused. Data on this is scarce and controversial–critics of plastic say the bags are typically  used just once, but the industry says they are frequently used, often as garbage bags, or to carry kids’ lunches to school, or pick up dog poop. (Banning plastic carryout bags means that people may have to buy bags for those purposes.) Focusing on the climate issue, the 120-page-long UK study says:

The paper, LDPE, non-woven PP and cotton bags should be reused at least 3, 4, 11 and 131 times respectively to ensure that they have lower global warming potential than conventional HDPE carrier bags that are not reused.

If I understand that correctly, it means that one reusable bag has the carbon footprint of 13 disposable bags that are used just once. If you use the disposable bag twice, you’ll need to deploy the reusable bag 26 times before you are ahead in terms of global warming. By the way, this doesn’t include the impact of washing the reusable bag in hot water, which is highly recommended because bacteria like E. coli and fecal coliform can thrive in reusable bags, according to this study, which, it must be said, was financed by the plastics industry.

A study from the University of California, Chico, funded by Keep California Beautiful, (PDF, download) analyzed the UK studies, as well as research from Scotland, Australia and a U.S. consulting firm and found that “reusable plastic bags can have lower environmental impacts than single-use polyethylene plastic grocery bags.” But it also found traces of cadmium and lead in the reusable bags. The professor who did the study has consulted for both plastic bag and reusable bag makers. Like I said, it’s complicated.

Plastic pollution of the oceans probably isn’t as bad as you think. You can find dire stories of plastic pollution, as well as birds being strangled by plastic bags, on the websites of Surfrider and Save the Bay. Oprah Winfrey devoted a television program to the problem, saying:

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches from the coast of California to Japan, and it’s estimated to be twice the size of Texas. “This is the most shocking thing I have seen,” Oprah says.

Whether Oprah has actually seen the garbage patch is anyone’s guess. But Angelicque “Angel” White, an assistant professor of oceanography at Oregon State, participated in one of the few expeditions solely aimed at understanding the abundance of plastic debris in the Pacific. He says the claim that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas is flat wrong. OSU reports:

“There is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is troubling, but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists,” White said. “We have data that allow us to make reasonable estimates; we don’t need the hyperbole.

According to NOAA and others, plastic debris in the oceans comes from many sources, including fishing lines, PET bottles, polyester clothing, detergent bottles, plumbing pipes, drinking straws and toothbrushes. The photo below comes from the website of a group called Heal the Bay, which crusades against plastic bags. Do you see a lot of plastic bags in the picture? Should we tax or ban all plastics because some end up as litter?

Why not recycle? Since we’re never going to ban all plastic bags and containers–plastics used to carry fruits and vegetables, plastic newspaper wrappers, styrofoam containers used for carryout food, etc–maybe the answer is to support and develop robust recycling streams for plastic. Like PET bottles, plastic bags are 100% recyclable. The plastic isn’t the problem; litter is the problem.

This is from my local Safeway. What's so hard about recycling?

Unfortunately, recycling rates are low, but the good news is that they are climbing. EPA recently reported (PDF, download) that in 2010  recycling was up from 12% to 15% for polyethylene bags, sacks and wraps. The more plastic bags are recycled and reused, the less their environmental impact, of course.

This argument was put to me by Mark Daniels, who is vice president of sustainability for Hilex, a leading manufacturer and recycler of plastic bags. Hilex pays about $300 to $400 a ton to supermarkets and others for used plastic bags, stretch wrap, the plastic wrap that goes around bottles, etc.  They company says it will recycled between 35 and 38 millions pounds of post-consumer plastic bags this year–a tiny fraction of all bags, but still–and it wishes it had more. Hilex does its recycling at a plant in Indiana that it opened in 2005, and doubled in size in 2010.

“It is less expensive for us to collect, purchase, transport and reprocess and redistribute that materials to all of our other plants than it is to purchase virgin material,” Mark told me. That’s true even though plastic bags are made from natural gas, which is cheap right now.

Hilex does its recycling at a plant in Indiana that it opened in 2005, and doubled in size in 2010. But a robust supply of post-consumer plastic is needed to keep the plant busy. “We can triple our capacity to nearly 100 million pounds,” Mark said. “But it’s difficult for our company and our board of directors to commit those tens of millions of dollars,” without the support of cities, towns, retailers and environmentalists for more recycling. “We should be 100% aligned with environmentalists,” Mark said.

The truth is, we don’t really have a clear answer to the age-old question of “paper or plastic,” now amended to say “paper, plastic or reusable?” Too many variables are at play.

My own answer? I carry several reusable bags in the trunk of my (hybrid) car and bring them into the grocery store when I remember. When I don’t, I take plastic and bring it back to be recycled. I don’t feel bad about that. Neither should you.

–

A personal note: Thanks for reading and commenting on my blog in 2011. This is my 188th and final post of the year. Enjoy the holidays, and see you in 2012.

About 64 million people visit McDonald’s every day. That’s a stunning number. They’ll see changes in the year ahead, some driven by a renewed sustainability push at the $24-billion fast-food giant.

LED lights in new and renovated stores. “Greener” packaging. Eco-labels on fish sold in Europe.

None of this is earth-shattering or, more importantly, earth-saving, but it’s the start of something big, says Bob Langert, McDonald’s v.p. for sustainability.

“We’re on a path to mainstream sustainability,” Bob told me by phone the other day. “This is transformational for us. We want to be bolder, and we want to make a bigger impact.” Most important, he said, the company wants to embed sustainability into its operations and, eventually, into its brand.

Business-friendly environmentalists who work with McDonald’s–groups like the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and Environmental Defense Fund–will applaud any sign that the company is ready to integrate sustainability into its core business and dig deeper into its supply chain to find ways to raise beef and chicken that are better for the planet. Skeptics, and there are many, will call this greenwashing, or perhaps “farmwashing,” a term I hadn’t heard until yesterday when I saw this anti-McDonald’s posting in Grist.

In a way, McDonald’s is like Walmart–it’s never going to be beloved in the Whole Foods-shopping, arugula-eating, tony precincts of Berkeley, Brooklyn or Bethesda. But the company is much too big to ignore or wish away.

Today, McDonald’s released its 2011 Sustainability Scorecard. Under the umbrella of sustainability, the company includes environmental responsibility, its supply chain, nutrition and well-being, employees and community grants and programs, albeit in a way that highlights accomplishments and isn’t easily transparent. (Please let me know if you can find an accounting of the company’s carbon footprint or a greenhouse gas reduction goal, because I couldn’t.)  But McDonald’s can feel good about a couple of big initiatives in the year just past.

First, as you’ve probably read, McDonald’s will reformulate all of the Happy Meals sold in the U.S. and Latin America to automatically include fruit and reduce the overall amount of calories and fat, mostly by serving smaller portions of frees. This is a big deal if you choose to blame the obesity crisis on the companies that sell food. I don’t. (See my blogpost, Mmm…mmm..who’s to blame for obesity?) It’s dangerous to confuse corporate responsibility with personal responsibility.

Companies are, however, responsible for what they buy and here McDonald’s is making meaningful progress, moving forward with its sustainable land management commitment, which is supposed to “ensure that, over time, the agricultural raw materials for our food and packaging originate from legal and sustainably managed land sources.”

Just what this will mean in practice isn’t clear, but the company has, as an example, joined with the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy, as well as Cargill and Walmart, to form the Global Conference on Sustainable Beef, which will try figure out how to make the beef production system more sustainable. For a host of reasons, not the least of which is the company’s desire to sell as many burgers as it can, I’m skeptical about this effort (see my blogpost, Meat: bad for you, bad for the climate) but the fact is that people will go on eating lots of beef. So we should wish McDonald’s and its allies good luck as they try to “green” the hamburger.

Meanwhile, McDonald’s has promised to source only certified sustainable palm oil by 2015, to buy more coffee certified by independent organizations like the Rainforest Alliance and to insure that its chicken products haven’t been fed soy from the Amazon. These are unglamorous initiatives that probably won’t drive sales, but they matter because of the company’s scale.

“We see our impacts on the supply chain as being paramount,” Bob told me. “We don’t buy niche products. We buy from the mainstream.” When McDonald’s says that beef needs to be raised differently, an entire industry will have to listen.

Bob Langert

It’s partly because I’ve known and trusted Bob for many years that I take these efforts seriously. He’s been in charge of the company’s corporate responsibility effort (now rebranded as sustainability) for nearly 20 years. (See my blogpost, What a long, strange trip it’s been for McDonald’s Bob Langert.) Most of that work, he told me, has been reactive and defensive. Remember Fast Food Nation? Or Super Size Me? Even McDonald’s involvement with the Marine Stewardship Council grew out of a crisis. “We had fisheries disappearing,” Bob said. More than 99% of McDonald’s fish now comes from MSC certified fisheries.

Now, Bob says, the company sees sustainability as an opportunity, and it’s willing to put real dollars behind it. “We’re investing a lot more into energy efficiency and green building,” he says, hundreds of millions of dollars to  rebuild and refresh restaurants, making LED lights standard. The company is buying renewable energy certificates to support the development of clean energy.

“Sustainability is going to be higher on the agenda for our senior management team,” he says.

To put its considerable muscle behind those words, McDonald’s needs to set some ambitious goals and targets, and report in a transparent way on its progress. Unlike, say, my local farmer’s market or yours, this is a company that can move the needle on environmental issues in a meaningful way.

Yalmaz Siddiqui is a dark-green environmentalist, who once started a business called, of all things, “eco-eco.” But in his job as the senior director for environmental strategy at Office Depot, the $11.6-billion a year office-products giant based in Boca Raton, FL, he doesn’t talk about saving the planet. Instead, he focuses on the  business benefits of sustainability, particularly those that accrue to Office Depot’s customers.

“It really is rare for me to invoke climate change or landfills or toxicity in my internal arguments,” Yalmaz says.  “We’re in Florida. We’re not in San Francisco or the Pacific Northwest. Impassioned arguments about environmental issues don’t resonate.”

Whatever his approach, it seems to be working: Office Depot has green cred. In Newsweek’s ranking of U.S. companies, they were the top retailer and No. 8 overall,  ahead of rival Staples (17), Best Buy (19),  J.C. Penny (64), Starbucks (82) and Whole Foods Market (106). While the rankings are debatable, Newsweek wrote:

Office Depot, at No. 8, is the single retailer to make it into the U.S. top 10. It’s had its share of operational successes—saving 3,000 tons of wood and up to $1.5 million a year simply by delivering goods in paper bags rather than cardboard boxes, for instance. But, as with IBM, perhaps more significant are the tools Office Depot provides to its largest customers, including cities, states, and large corporations. It shows customers the environmental and financial tradeoffs of their purchasing decisions on everything from copy paper to cleaning supplies.

This customer-centric approach helps explain what Office Depot can do, and what it can’t, when it comes to “green.” You won’t see solar on the roofs of  Office Depot stores, at least for now, because the return on the investment is insufficient.  You will see attention paid to energy efficiency because the ROI makes sense, and you will see even more attention paid to selling greener products because profits from those sales drop right to the bottom line.

I spoke to Yalmaz by phone the other day because I’m  interested in how people inside companies — intrapreneurs, they’re sometimes called — promote change. There’s a small army of these folks in corporate America, and the work they do matters. With Washington gridlocked (or worse) on environmental issues, it’s up to corporate America (as well as state and local government) to deliver the change we need.

Yalmaz, who is 41, started “eco-eco” after college to sell organic clothing, reusable organic cotton bags and other dark-green stuff. “It didn’t resonate with the marketplace,” he said. Subsequently, he got a masters in environment and development, did consulting work with PwC and IBM focusing on the forest, paper and packaging industries and then joined Office Depot in 2006.

The company divides its environmental strategy in three: Be Greener, Buy Greener and Sell Greener. Be Greener focuses on internal operations, and this is mostly about saving money. Mostly but not entirely: Office Depot, as you’d expect, buys recycled paper, for which there’s essentially no business case. (If classical economists were right about how the world works, there’s be no recycled paper. It costs more and performs no better than paper made from virgin forest.)

But, as Yalmaz notes: “It’s an iconic product, when it comes to organizational greening. It’s the everyday symbol of environmental commitment. It’s very tangible.” Through its purchasing requirements, he explained, the federal government helped create the market for recycled paper.

Office Depot also got a lot of attention for replacing cardboard boxes with lighter weight bags when delivering supplies to institutional customers. That was a double win, saving the company money and pleasing customers. “It was sold as way to satisfy customer desire to have less packaging,” Yalmaz says.

Office Depot also took a pragmatic, customer-driven approach when it set out to define greener products. The firm looked at the purchasing policies of key, leading-edge buyers like the EPA and the U.S. Green Building Council, rather than setting out on its own to measure the environmental impact of what it sells. “We’ve tried to make the definition of green products as simple and accessible as possible,” Yalmaz says. That’s a different approach from the one taken by Walmart and its partners in The Sustainability Consortium, who are setting out to do complex, science-based life cycle analyses of thousands of products.

Unlike Walmart, Office Depot hasn’t set big attention-getting goals like zero waste or being powered entirely by renewable energy. It’s ranked No. 16,  behind Staples (No. 4) and Walmart (No. 5) in EPA’s list of the top 20 retail green power partners. But, to its credit, Office Depot is unusually transparent about its environmental performance, posting a dashboard that tracks its progress or lack thereof. For example, you can see that the percentage of copy paper sold with post-consumer recycled content actually fell between 2008 and 2010.

This week, to spur sales of green products, Office Depot recognized 25 of its own customers for their “leadership in greener purchasing.” Winners from the FORTUNE 500 include Chevron, JP Morgan Chase, Google, Bechtel and Comerica. Says Yalmaz: “If I was to be asked, what is the ultimate metric of success of our environmental program, I’d say it was ‘green spend’ by customer.”

To borrow a phrase from economist and author Gernot Wagner, but will the planet notice? That’s hard to say. Clearly, if Office Depot sells a lot more greener products in place of conventional products, we’ll be better off. And if greener corporate behavior paves the way for the political action needed to have a big impact on climate change and other issues, great. “Normalization of green behavior works better than a message of environmental guilt,” Yalmaz says. On the other hand, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that buying recycled paper or Pilot pens made out of recycled bottles (try them, they’re cool) get us where we need to go. It won’t.

GI Joe has been green since 1964, when the action figure first went into battle for toymaker Hasbro.

Now his plastic and cardboard packaging will be environmentally-friendly, too.

So will the packaging for such beloved toys and games as Mr. Potato Head, Play-Doh, Monopoly and Candyland, all of which, along with more recent phenomena like Littlest Pet Shop and  the Transformers, are made by Hasbro, a Pawtucket, RI-based firm that sold about $4 billion of toys last year.

Hasbro releases its first corporate social responsibility report today, and it should be available here. The company offered me a preview of the report and a chance to talk with Brian Goldner, the company’s CEO, and Kathrin Belliveau, vice president of corporate responsibility at Hasbro.

Hasbro was formed by brothers Henry and Helal Hassenfeld (get it, Has-bro?) in 1923, and family member and ex-CEO Alan Hassenfeld remains on the board; that kind of long-term family ownership often leads to an ethic of social responsibility. In fact, Hasbro has paid close attention to its social impact for years, particularly when it comes to overseas factories. It’s been slower to look at environmental issues  but, even so, the company tops its bigger rival, Mattel, in the rankings released just this week by nonprofit Climate Counts. [See yesterday's blogpost, Big brands take climate action but...] Hasbro also ranks #59 on FORTUNE’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” List. I don’t know the company well but indications are it’s doing a lot of the right things.

Goldner has chaired the board’s social responsibility committee since 2006. I asked him why the company is doing its first CSR report now.

Partly, he said, it’s because the company is expanding–in recent years, it opened marketing and sales offices in China, Brazil, Russia and Korea, among other places–and Hasbro wants to communicate its values to its employees everywhere.

“As we hire hundreds of new people around the world,” Goldner said, “we want people to understand that we’re not only in the markets to win but we’re there to be a good corporate citizen.”

He also said: “At the end of the day, I think it comes down to, frankly, myself and our senior management team who feel very strongly about this as individual citizens and people who are running a company.” CSR at Hasbro is a “long process of continuous improvement.”

Most of todays’ news (such as it is) is about packaging. The company said it would eliminate polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from “all new core toy and game packaging beginning in 2013,” it promised to insure that 90 percent of paper and board packaging will come from recycled material, or from sustainable forests by 2015, and it noted that it has already replaced all the wire ties in its packages with ties made from paper, rattan or bamboo. Fun fact: The company said the changeover to rattan and bamboo “eliminated approximately 34,000 miles of wire ties – more than enough to wrap around the circumference of the Earth.”

In truth, the planet is unlikely to notice much of this. Reducing packaging is all to the good, but it’s a bigger issue when it comes to things we consume frequently (fast food, drinks, groceries, etc). Hasbro’s packaging reductions were surely driven, at least in part, by Walmart’s attempts to get all of its suppliers to cut back on packaging. Said Belliveau: “Certainly their scorecard process, which we have been very committed to, has guided us, but we also have our own aspirations and requirements that are driving our business.”

Littlest Pet Shop Hamster Playground: Despite the plastic, it's probably "greener" than a real hamster

What’s more, Hasbro will continue to use lots of PVC. The company says it is keeping it in toys because it is a extremely durable plastic, which resists wear and tear. It’s low-cost, too. Belliveau said: “There’s a lot of good things about PVC. We’re not here to attack PVC. Really, it came to a landfill issue, and an incineration issue.” PVC is said to give off toxins when burned.

On greenhouse gases, Hasbro said recently that it is on track to reduce its direct global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) 10 percent for the time period 2008-2012, building upon earlier U.S. reductions of more than 43 percent from 2000-2007. It reported for the first time this year to the Carbon Disclosure Project. The company operates factories in East Longmeadow, MA, and Ireland, but most of its manufacturing is done by third-party vendors in Asia; it’s in the process of collecting emissions data from them as well.

But Hasbro’s bigger impacts are social–on the kids who play with its toys, and on the workers who make them. Here, the company has a good record, as best as I can tell. In 2007, when other toy companies, including rival Mattel, were forced to recall millions of toys made in China because of worries about lead paint, Hasbro was unaffected.

In cooperation with others in the industry, Hasbro has set labor standards for factories in its supply chain since the early 1990s. In this report, for the first time, the company makes the names of all of its suppliers public.

Goldner told me that when Hasbro has made acquisitions, it learned that its costs tend to be higher than rival toymakers. “We tend to pay about 10% more for product,” he said. “That has a lot to do with the product safety protocols that we have in place.”

The payback from those higher costs is hard to quantify. It comes in the form of recalls that are avoided, or scandals about child labor that don’t happen.

Goldner hopes that consumers will, over time, recognize Hasbro’s efforts. “We believe the Hasbro name can be a trust mark,” he said. We’ll see.

Led by Unilever, Astra Zeneca and Nike, consumer brands are taking climate change more seriously than ever, says a new report from Climate Counts, a nonprofit that rates some of the world’s largest companies on their climate impact.

Big companies are reporting emissions, committing to targets and becoming more vocal in the policy arena, according to the report.

“There’s evidence to suggest we have reached a remarkable tipping point,” says Mike Bellamente, project director of Climate Counts. “Global corporations are increasingly acknowledging climate change as reality and are adopting measures to reduce their emissions and environmental impact.”

This is the fifth report from Climate Counts, which is the brainchild of Stonyfield Farms CE-Yo Gary Hirshberg. The ratings are intended to make consumers more aware of leaders and laggards on climate — the term of art for this is “rank ‘em and spank ‘em — as well as to spur companies to do better. or whatever reason, companies are improving: Bellamente told me over the phone the other day that the average score for the 136 companies rated this year is up by an impressive 54% from the initial set of ratings.

This is nice to hear but the news comes with a big caveat. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this past decade of growth in both “green” talk and carbon emissions,  it’s this: Voluntary corporate behavior won’t produce an adequate response to the climate crisis. Indeed, it has not: Greenhouse gas emissions rose by record levels last year. “We haven’t made (climate) progress as a society,” Mike acknowledges. Only climate policy will bring meaningful progress.

The trouble is, even companies that have adopted their own sustainability programs are not as active as they need to be in the policy and political arena. Climate Counts reports that 30 of the big companies it ranks expressed  strong support for federal level climate policy, but 82 companies (or 60%) remained silent or in opposition of such efforts. The companies in the survey don’t include stalwart opponents of climate regulation–the coal, utility and oil companies–and so it actually overestimates the degree to which business supports climate action.

Still, as more companies  acknowledge the reality of climate change and reduce their own emissions, this will help set the stage for better policy.

“Many companies are performing well,” Mike told me. “Sustainability is integrated as a philosophy across their business.” Prominent examples include Unilever, this year’s No. 1 company with a score of 88 out of 100, and Nike, with a score of 85, which topped the list last year. (See my blogposts, Unilever CEO: Don’t stay on the sidelines and Nike: Running towards sustainable consumption.)

Other companies that led their industry sectors, with scores in parentheses, include Southwest Airlines (55), Anheuser-Busch/InBev (57), Bank of America (82), UPS (83), Starbucks (70), Herman Miller and Masco (63), Marriott (73), L’Oreal (78), AB Electrolux (80), Microsoft (68), GE (77), AstraZeneca (86) and Hasbro (52).

Some other highlights:

Amazon and Apple are among the laggards in the Climate Counts ratings. That may surprise you because both are innovative companies, and tech companies generally score well on green behavior, but it shouldn’t. Amazon is all but invisible on the climate  issue, scoring a meager 11. “There is little evidence to suggest that Amazon has a management plan in place to account for emissions, reduce their overall environmental impact or report on their progress,” Mike told me. (Not coincidentally, my friends in Seattle tell me that the company plays a minimal role in the sustainability conversations and civil life of the city, in contrast to Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, REI, etc.) I emailed Amazon for a reaction, and haven’t heard back.

Apple does far better, scoring 60 out of 100, but it still places last in the electronics sector, behind leaders Siemens, HP, IBM, Nokia and Sony. “Unlike corporations of similar size, they fail to disclose a formal company-wide emissions reduction target,” Mike says. Nor does Apply publish a sustainability report.

Rising up the charts were Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, Amgen and VF Corp. Wyndham Hotels surged 30 points  to 57 by launching a green initiative, topping Starwood (48), Hyatt (36) and Hilton (22). Pharmaceutical company Amgen rose 29 points to achieve a score of 57, and VF Corporation, which owns such brands as Nautica and Wrangler, gained 13 points to lift its score to 34.

The “footprint” graphic below reflects the fact that Climate Counts divides companies into three groups. Those that score 50-100 are “striding” towards a low carbon future and identified in green, those that score 13 to 49 are “starting” to address their climate impact and marked in yellow, and those that score 12 or less are “stuck” and colored red.

In 2006, I wrote a cover story for FORTUNE with the headline: Wal-Mart Saves the Planet. Since then, I’ve written dozens of stories about the retail giant. I’ve reported on Walmart’s impact on the gold mining industry (Green Gold in FORTUNE), its efforts to protect child laborers in Uzbekistan and salmon fisherman in Alaska (Walmart: A bully benefactor on Fortune.com), the launch of a path-breaking sustainability index (Inside Walmart’s sustainability index at GreenBiz), LED lights in Walmart parking lots, the company’s CSR reports, etc. I’ve been critical at times–pointing to Walmart’s BIG problem: climate change and writing that Walmart CEO (Mike Duke) has a problem with gays–but most of my coverage of the company’s sustainability effort has been laundatory.

Now here comes Stacy Mitchell, a smart reporter, with a six-part series in Grist called Walmart’s Greenwash: Why the retail giant is still unsustainable. She assails Walmart for promoting suburban sprawl, making only token efforts to buy renewable energy and selling cheap throwaway stuff. She also faults mainstream environmental groups for focusing “on the small bits of good that Walmart could do—reduce PVC in packaging, for example—while ignoring the much larger consequences of its ever-expanding business model.” She also says that she has been “shocked by just how much of a public relations boost the media have given the company and how little public accountability they have demanded in return.”

These are serious criticisms that deserve a responses. Stacy highlights some important points. Fundamentally, though, we disagree about Walmart, and this post (it’s necessarily longer than most) is an attempt to explain why. Some of our differences are probably a result of what psychologists called confirmation bias, which describes the way all of us seek out, sift through and read evidence in ways that confirm our preconceptions. Confirmation bias is a problem in journalism, politics, economics and even in the so-called hard sciences.

Stacy Mitchell

I’m sure that my experience with Walmart has left me vulnerable to confirmation bias. I’ve visited Bentonville, gotten to know executives at the firm, and the company has participated in Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference, which I co-chair;  my career and reputation have been helped by my reporting on the company. I suspect the same is true of Stacy, who wrote a book in 2008 called Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses. She has “advised numerous communities on strategies and policies to limit chain store proliferation and strengthen locally owned businesses,” according to her bio.

So read on (skeptically) as I try to sort through some of the issues she’s raised.

Renewable energy: In an article headlined Think Walmart Uses 100% clean energy? Try 2%, Stacy notes that Walmart has been slow to adopt renewable energy. The company has several big, ambitious, stretch goals –  one  of them is to be powered by 100% renewable energy — and she writes, accurately, that  ”journalists often repeat these goals verbatim, so they function like stealth marketing slogans that infiltrate media coverage.” Stacy did her own calculation and found that a mere 2% of Walmart’s operations are powered by renewable energy.

That doesn’t even make Walmart No. 1 among retailers, let alone when it is compared to other big companies and government agencies. Walmart ranks No. 15 in EPA’s top 50 green power purchasers, and ranks No. 5 among retailers, behind Kohl’s, Whole Foods Markets, Starbucks and Staples–smaller companies that buy more renewable energy than the Bentonville behemoth.

I asked David Ozment, Walmart’s energy guy, about this, and he told me that the company expects to move up the list next year. Progress in such a big company takes time. “We’ve got to plant this forest, one tree at a time,” he said. Recently, Walmart struck a deal with Solar City to add solar photovoltaics to another 61 sites. Walmart is also one of the largest, if not the largest, customers of Bloom Energy, having installed Bloom’s fuel cells at 26 sites. It’s also  experimenting with on-site wind turbines at a couple of stores. So all the movement is in the right direction.

But the numbers remain small. Walmart and Sam’s Club have about 4,400 stores in the U.S.  The trouble is, as I wrote in GreenBiz last spring, that “buying renewable energy would drive up (Walmart’s) costs, with no tangible benefits to customers, and put the company at a competitive disadvantage.” Walmart’s not willing to do that.

Cheap stuff: In a story headlined Is Your Stuff Falling Apart? Thank Walmart, Stacy writes about a $6 toaster (!) and $10 jeans. Americans are not only buying more stuff, we’re throwing away more than ever, she reports–an average of 83 pounds of textiles per person, mostly discarded apparel, each year, four times as much as we did in the 1980s. She writes:

Where once we measured value when we shopped, Walmart trained us to see only price. Its hard bargaining pushed manufacturers offshore and drove them, year after year, to cut more corners and make shoddier products….

While there are certainly factors beyond Walmart that have contributed to this ever-expanding avalanche of consumption, the company has been a major driver of the trend. Its growth and profitability rest on fueling an ever-faster churn of products, from factory to shelf to house to landfill.

This, too, is an important point. If Walmart and its suppliers make things more efficiently, but the company sells more and more and more things, the planet probably will be worse off. (I say “probably” because if goods sold by Walmart merely  displace goods made more inefficiently  by others, the planet could actually be better off.) But the bigger question here is, who’s responsible for what Stacy describes as “this ever-expanding avalanche of consumption?”

It doesn’t please me to say so but people who buy cheap, throwaway stuff do so because they want cheap, throwaway stuff, or because they can’t afford to buy more expensive, durable stuff, like a Patagonia jacket or the $249 All-Clad Deluxe Slow Cooker that I was eyeing the other day at Williams-Sonoma. The Hamilton Beach slow cooker  at right sells for $14.88 at Walmart.

Markets are far from perfect, goodness knows, but retail markets are more competitive and transparent than most. People get what they want, for the most part. Saying that Walmart “trained us” to see only price reminds me of the argument that big-box stories destroyed Main Street, or Amazon and Barnes & Noble put the independent bookseller out of business. No, they didn’t–their customers did.

The sustainability index: At Grist, Stacy’s story is headlined:  Walmart’s promised green product rankings fall off the radar. She writes: “Was the index just a PR ploy from the start?”

Oh, come now. If this was a PR ploy, the index has been an even bigger flop than the critics would say.  After all, the green product rankings have fallen off the radar, as the Grist headline notes.

One reason you haven’t heard much about the index is that it takes an enormous amount of work to do science-based, life-cycle analyses for tens of thousands of consumer products–that’s the goal of the project. This is going to take time, and it is going to be controversial, but the fact is that the undertaking has won broad-based support not just from Walmart suppliers who, arguably, could be muscled into joining, but from competitors including Best Buy, Kroger, Marks & Spencer and Safeway. Seventh Generation, Stonyfield Yogurt and NGOs including Environmental Defense Fund, NRDC and the World Wildlife Fund are also working with the university-based Sustainability Consortium. This is a big deal.

“So far this has done little to alter business as usual,” Stacy writes. Uh, no. People I respect–I’m thinking here about Hunter Lovins, Catherine Greener and others–who spend their lives working with companies to improve environmental performance tell me that Walmart’s efforts to green its supply chain, including the index, have already had a big impact on the entire consumer products industry.

Suppliers in China are taking note, too. For a nuanced look at Walmart’s impact there, read How Walmart is Changing China, a terrific piece by Orville Schell in The Atlantic. He writes admiringly of the work being done by Walmart but ends on a somber note:

However smart, prescient, and successful Walmart’s sustainability efforts actually turn out to be, just how “sustainable” is the whole bloody global-retail proposition that lies at the heart of the company’s amazing progress? Maybe Walmart’s new initiatives will pencil out in a business sense for the company and, within the terms of the current retail game, even serve as a model of good environmental stewardship. But will the hyperactive retail-consumption model that it has pioneered for global consumers pencil out for the world?

…The bitter reality is that even if unrestrained consumerism becomes less environmentally destructive per unit of production than it was in the past, it is still unsustainable in the long run. So even as this most innovative of corporate and statist green strategies may represent an environmental breakthrough and good business for Walmart, and good politics for the Chinese government, it may nonetheless end up being very bad business for humankind.

What Walmart can’t do: If you pay attention to Walmart, you can’t help but be impressed by its size and power. Schell, a veteran journalist, describes it  “as a corporate entity larger in scope and logistical complexity than any other in human history.” He writes: “Compare Walmart’s annual revenue with the GDP of sovereign nations, and it ranks in the top quartile.”

But it’s easy to overestimate Walmart’s power. This, I think, gets to the heart of the differences between those of us (like me) who believe that Walmart is part of the solution to the world’s environmental problems and those (like Stacy) who believe it is the cause of those problems.

Imagine, for a moment, that Walmart shut down tomorrow. Would the world become less globalized? Would people buy and shop less? What would take its place–locally-owned, small-scale merchants or other big-box stores like Costco or Target? Would Walmart’s 2.1 million workers be better off? How about its 200 million customers?

Walmart didn’t just spring, fully-formed, from the mind of Sam Walton. It grew into the world’s biggest company because it served people’s needs. Maybe not mine–I’ve spent less than $100 in my life at Walmart. Certainly not Stacy’s. But hundreds of millions of  people, not just in the U.S. but around the world, shop at Walmart, in large part because the company has enabled them to buy things that were once beyond their reach. Walmart isn’t a bunch of conniving businessmen in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart is us.

It should go withouit saying that Walmart didn’t create consumption or globalization. Nor can it stop them. All it can do is try to make consumption and globalization more sustainable and humane.

As Elizabeth Sturcken of the Environmntal Defense Fund, who works with the company, put it:

Is Walmart still unsustainable? Yes? Probably 95% of our consumer goods, and retail and supply chain system is. But does anyone have more power to change that system than Walmart? No.

It’s not all good or all evil. As usual, the reality is more complex.

So, by all means, let’s hold Walmart accountable.

Let’s ask its top executives–notably, Mike Duke–to speak more publicly and forcefully about sustainability, so that everyone in the organization understands that it matters.

Let’s ask Walmart to build sustainability metrics into its compensation system. There’s no more powerful signal to employees that a company cares about going green.

Let’s ask Walmart to set near-term targets for buying renewable energy or reducing waste to put more teeth into those long-term aspirational goals.

Let’s ask Walmart to begin a conversation with its consumers about what to buy and what they can afford.

And by all means let’s ask Walmart to be a louder voice in public policy debates about energy and climate change.

But there’s no point asking Walmart to stop being Walmart.