Leslie Dach

Why Walmart changed

May 23, 2011

Business is business, they say, but I’m often reminded that business is personal, too.

Back in about 2005, Lee Scott, who was then Ceo of Walmart, traveled with Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, to the top of Mount Washington, to visit a weather research station and meet with environmental scientists, including Steve Hamburg, who’s now the chief scientist at EDF. On their way, Scott stopped to visit with a New Hampshire maple farmer who told him that warmer weather was threatening the maple syrup business his family had operated for four generations. By the end of the trip, Scott had seen the impacts of climate change for himself – and seen how they could evolve into business issues for Walmart.

Mike Duke, Scott’s successor as Ceo, took a climate-change field trip of his own a few years later. He spent the night in an ice hotel on a glacier in Sweden, where he heard about the impact of climate change on the arctic. A doubter before then, he was convinced. Meanwhile, another Walmart exec went to Turkey to meet with cotton farmers, visiting a conventional farm — where cotton plants are intensively treated with herbicides and pesticides — and an organic farm where workers and the land were treated better.

Jib Ellison

These trips were arranged by a former river rafting guide named Jib Ellison, whose consulting firm, BluSkye, has guided Walmart on its remarkable journey towards sustainability. A colorful character–he once arranged rafting trips with Americans and Russians to help ease Cold War tensions–Ellison is the hero of a lively new book, Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (HarperCollins, $27.99), by Edward Humes, an award-winning journalist. It’s the first book about the greening of WalMart, and a valuable one, particularly for its insights into array of overlapping forces that drove the makeover of Walmart.

About those field trips, for example, Humes writes that the WMT execs

…returned home–as Ellison had planned and hope–moved by what (they) had seen, felt and heard. As never before, Wal-Mart’s leaders had seen the face of climate change, pesticides and air pollution–and it was the weathered face of a maple farmer, it was the vanishing snow lines of ancient glaciers, it was the clothing and skin of children dusky from pesticide residue. “You don’t get that in a briefing paper,” Ellison remarked to Scott. The CEO nodded.

Now, business isn’t just personal, of course. Scott began exploring sustainability back in the mid-2000s because Walmart had s terrible reputation, particularly in places (like Chicago and LA) where it had no stores and wanted to open some. Once Ellison got in the door, thanks to his friendship with Peter Seligmann, the founder of Conservation International, who introduced him to Rob Walton, Walmart’s chairman, he was able to show Scott that the company could save money by going green. [click to continue…]

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They said it at Brainstorm Green

April 6, 2011

Who says environmentalists are all gloom and doom? In terms of sheer fun, the 2011 edition of Brainstorm Green, FORTUNE’s conference about business and the environment, topped them all.

 

Chuck Leavell at Brainstorm Green

Along with  earnest talk about climate policy, nuclear power, investing in green and electric cars, there were early morning surfing lessons from Laird Hamilton, spectacular images from National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, fabulous sustainable food from star chefs (including Rick Moonen of rmSeafood and Michel Nischan of Wholesome Wave) and even dancing to the music of a band put together by Chuck Leavell, the keyboardist for the Rolling Stones, tree farmer extraordinaire, author of a new book (Growing a Better America) and all-around good guy.

What we all learned can’t be condensed into one blog post, but here are a few of my notes and quotes from our jam-packed 48 hours in Laguna Beach:

The future of coal: Lively debate here, with Michael Morris, the straight-talking CEO of coal-burning utility American Electric Power saying that without new government policy, coal will continue to be burned in massive quantities, not just in the U.S. but around the world. [click to continue…]

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Two cheers for Wal-Mart’s CO2 pledge

February 25, 2010

WMT-EDFUntil now, Walmart’s bold sustainability efforts were marred by a glaring omission.

The $405-billion a year retailer has worked hard since 2005 to save energy, reduce waste and sell more sustainable products.

But it resisted pressures to reduce or hold steady its own greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, its carbon emissions have grown, as the middle graphic below shows. (There’s a cleaner version in WMT’s responsibility report, here.) When it comes to global warming, Walmart would appear to be doing more harm now than it was three or five years ago.

en_c_impact1

Today, Walmart made its first major commitment to reduce greenhouse gases–although, in typical WMT fashion, rather than set a tough goal that might affect its own growth curve, the company plans to turn up the pressure on its thousands of suppliers to reduce their emissions. [click to continue…]

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