“Today’s food system is unfair, ineffective and operates beyond ecological limits,” Mark Lee says, via email.

“Unfair in that some 925 million are malnourished…

“Ineffective in that there are enough calories out there to feed everyone, but we fail to do so (and if we fail to do so for 7 billion, how will we cope with 9-10 by mid-century?)…

“Beyond ecological limits in too many ways too count – freshwater use, soil degradation, climate impacts, you name it.”

Mark is not an environmental activist. He’s the executive director of SustainAbility, a think tank and strategy consultancy that has worked with such food industry clients as Chiquita, Coca-Cola Kellogg’s, Mars and McDonald’s, Nestle, Starbucks and Unilever. He approached me because Sustainability recently released a report called Appetite for Change, about the food industry and how to fix it.

I’ve been writing a lot about food lately because it interests me, because food and agriculture matter a great deal if you care about climate or global poverty or health, and because there’s so much debate about what the path forward should be. Organics? Farmers markets? Genetically engineered crops? Vegetarianism? Local?

This 41-page report, based on interviews with about two dozen business people, environmental experts and government officials, finds an emerging consensus, inside and outside the industry, that “the food system needs to be dramatically transformed.” The report says:

We need a food system that produces enough, for everyone, within ecological limits, while treating all players fairly.

With a bit more specificity, SustainAbility defines a sustainable food system as “one that is reliable, resilient and transparent, which produces food within ecological limits, empowers food producers, and ensures accessible, nutritious food for all.”

But, while big companies and small are experimenting, sometimes creatively, with new approaches,  there’s no agreement on how to get from here to there.

I talked the other day with Mark and Jennifer Biringer, a SustainAbility director and an author of the report, and they pointed me to a few areas where business and environmental imperatives are coming into alignment.

To insure a secure supply chain, big companies are increasingly builder closer ties with small farms in poor countries, working with them to improve their environmental performance, their efficiency and their business viability.

Starbucks has worked for more than a decade with Conservation International to develop ethical sourcing guidelines that reward coffee growers who conserve water and energy and protect biodiversity. Mars is working with academic partners to sequence the cacao genome, hoping to improve yields and lift the standard of living for coffee farmers. (See my 2010 blogpost, The man who would save chocolate.) Costco has had a pilot program in which it sources fresh produce from smallholder farmers, such as green beans from Guatemala [PDF, download] for its U.S. stores.

And then, of course, there’s Walmart, which among other things, is seeking to buy more local produce for its stores. “I do see Walmart as a disruptor,” Jennifer said. The giant retailer is bringing pressure on food manufacturers to get a better handle on the environmental footprint and to drive transparency down their supply chain.

Companies that aren’t in the food industry stand to profit from some of these trends, the report notes. More than six million people in India, China and Indonesia have become subsribers to Nokia’s Life Tools [PDF, download], a subscription service designed for mobile phones in emerging markets that provides agricultural information (weather, market prices) as well as education and entertainment. IBM, which sponsored the SustainAbility report, along with Nestle and Sodexo, has a technology platform called Smarter Food that can trace food from “farm to fork” which both promotes food safety and environmental accountability.

One obvious problem with the food system, as the report notes, is that food policy and politics “are driven by who is in power” and  aren’t designed to promote sustainability or healthy eating. Experts interviewed by Sustainability

listed new and better policy as prerequisite to progress before closing. Distressingly, few are optimistic that improvements will come without major disruptions to the food system occurring first, sharing a perception that we likely will stretch the current system to (or beyond) its limit before acting.

For a variety of reason, the price of food at the supermarket doesn’t reflect its true cost. [See my 2010 blogpost, The high cost of cheap food] Farm price supports, cheap energy and cheap water all drive down the prices of commodity crops (corn, soy) and meat. Meanwhile, few subsidies go to vegetables and fruits. Farm subsidies and trade barriers also make it hard for farmers in poor countries to compete with those in the U.S. and EU. “Government does a huge amount to pick winners and losers,” Jennifer said.

In today’s New York Times, food writer Mark Bittman has a provocative article arguing that the U.S. should tax “bad” foods (like sugary sodas and fatty, salty fries) and use the money to subsidize fruits and vegetables and provide nutrition education. He quotes a study that found that

a penny tax per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages in New York State would save $3 billion in health care costs over the course of a decade, prevent something like 37,000 cases of diabetes and bring in $1 billion annually.

I’m not inclined to favor more government intervention in markets–just the opposite–but this idea is worth considering, I think, because it’s a way of adjusting the price of food to reflect its true costs. [See my 2010 blogpost, The high cost of cheap food] Big companies, of course, hate the idea of a “junk food” tax. While Coca Cola and PepsiCo offer healthy options, they also benefit from corn subsidies and want to maximize sales of sugary soft drinks. The trouble is, particularly as medical expenses become socialized through Medicaid and Medicare, all of us are paying the costs of the obesity epidemic.

The food system is so broken that maybe it’s time to think about radical fixes.

Unless you avoid pork for religious reasons, you’ve probably eaten pork products from Smithfield Foods: the bacon or sausage in a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, Armour-Eckrich bologna or ham, pork from Bob Evans or Jimmy Dean’s, an Esskay hot dog at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, and quite likely your Easter ham.

Smithfield is a pork giant. It has 49 factories, 500 or so hog farms, 48,000 employees and about $11 billion in revenues in FY2010. It slaughtered about 27 million animals last year in the U.S. “We’re the largest pork producer in the world, by a long shot,” says Dennis Treacy, the company’s chief sustainability officer.

Yes, Smithfield has a chief sustainability officer–and that may surprise you if you remember reading horror stories about Smithfield’s confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s), its problems managing pig manure, its labor conflicts or animal welfare  issues in places like The New York Times and Rolling Stone. The company was featured–not in a flattering way–in the movie Food Inc. and sued by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Dennis Treacy

Treacy had problems with Smithfield, too, before joining the company. In fact, Treacy, who was the director of the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for the state of Virginia from 1998 to 2002 under Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore, once sued Smithfield for polluting the state’s waters.  (You could look it up.) In 1997, Smithfield was fined $12 million, one of the largest fines at the time, for violations of the federal Clean Water Act.

Now, though, Treacy says Smithfield has cleaned up not just the water but its own act. He’s been with the company for nine years, and says he was hired to make the company more sustainable and improve its reputation. “We have slowly but surely built a sustainability program,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do, and everybody wants to work for a company that is respected.”

I met Dennis earlier this week in Washington. He seems like a good guy, and he’s spent his career on environmental issues–he studied fisheries and wildlife at Virginia Tech, got a law degree from Lewis and Clark in Oregon, which is a top environmental law school, and he lives on a small farm near Richmond where he and his wife raise chickens and rabbits.

There’s solid evidence, too, that Smithfield is changing. The company settled with Waterkeeper, which praised its remediation efforts. After a long and bitter battle with union organizers, workers got to vote, formed a union and negotiated a contract with Smithfield. The company got 36 notices of environmental violations in 2009, the last year in which it reported data, and paid $81,726 in fines–which isn’t zero, but it’s far less than $12 million and its numbers are generally moving in the right direction. “We’ve got 48,000 employees out there,” Dennis told me, “and while we’re having this discussion, one of them is doing something wrong. This is a really tough indiustry. Many of our facilities are old.” The company published a 101-page corporate social responsibility report, disclosing more than anyone would want to know about its greenhouse gas emissions, water use, employee safety record, community giving, etc.

Treacy says there are several reasons why Smithfield has changed. No company likes running up big legal fees or paying big fines. Some of its “green” initiatives deliver directly to the bottom line–for example, it captures methane emissions and turns them into electricity at its big pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C.  Besides that, some of its biggest customers –Walmart and McDonald’s, notably–have insisted that their suppliers become more environmentally responsible.

“The McDonald’s of the world don’t want people attacking their brand. Neither does Walmart,” Dennis said. “Neither do we.” As part of the Walmart-driven Sustainability Index, Smithfield has joined with other pork producers to fund research at the University of Arkansas to better measure the carbon footprint of pork production, from farm to plate.

Still, Smithfield is a prime example of what critics like to describe as “industrial agriculture” or “factory farms.” There’s nothing bucolic about raising pigs for the mass market. Pigs don’t wander free. They’re raised indoors, in crowded barns.  Their manure drops through slats in the floor and is flushed through underground pipes into giant, smelly lagoons. This creates what Smithfield likes to call a “natural fertilizer” which is then spread or sprayed onto fields where corn, soybeans, Bermuda grass or other crops are grown. (See the chart below, from Smithfield; click to make it larger.)

All of Smithfield’s farms s meet ISO 14001 standards, an environmental standard that requires third-party certification. “This is one of the most highly regulated activities there is in the environmental field,” Dennis says, adding wryly: “We can’t afford to make a mistake given the reputation we enjoy.”

Given Smithfield’s sorry history, those of us who pay attention to sustainability would do well to withhold cheers, at least for now. We’ll see how the company performs for the next few years.

Beyond that, we should consider the bigger questions about whether it makes sense to grow vast amounts of corn and soybeans to feed pigs to create animal protein. Many people argue that meat production is  bad for the planet and that eating as much meat as Americans do (twice global averages) is bad  for our  health, although the science isn’t settled. See, for example, Mark Bittman on the evils of meat and a recent, differing and provocative  view from Gary Taubes (Is Sugar Toxic?),  both in The New York Times.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at a different approach to meat–an idea known as Meatless Mondays, that comes not from PETA but from a global corporation that feeds tends of millions of people every day.

Arguably, Walmart has done more than any environmental group, politician, government regulator or Silicon Valley clean tech firm to nudge the U.S. economy towards sustainability in the last five years.  Walmart’s 2011 Global Responsibility Report, published last week, makes clear that despite the recession and some revently rough going for the company–lately its stock has lagged the S&P500 –Walmart is pushing ahead towards its big goals: To generate no waste, to be 100%-powered by renewable energy, and to sell lots more products that sustain people and the environment.

Yet a closer look at the report demonstrates that there are limits to what any company, even one as vast as Walmart, can do. Most of its environmental gains have come from doing what Walmart has always done very well–driving efficiency in its stores and supply chain. When sustainable initiatives cost more money, as they sometimes do, progress has been halting.

Still, Walmart deserves at least two cheers, maybe two-and-half for its efforts, particularly in the current, dispiriting political climate.

As Elizabeth Sturcken of the Environmental Defense Fund, which works closely with Walmar, told me:

Leadership on environmental issues is coming from Bentonville these days, not from Washington. Some people in Washington want to roll back basic environmental protection on clean air and clean water, saying it’s bad for business. Our work with Walmart proves that’s not true….Generally,  all the signs that I see are full speed ahead.

Andrea Thomas, who has led Walmart’s sustainability work for the past six months, made a similar point. The company set big, bold, broad goals back in 2005, without knowing how it would meet them. Since then, it has discovered unexpected business benefits.

Rather than being paralyzed by (the goals), they ignited  a lot of energy behind doing experiments, trying different things. Today, there’s a lot of interesting work going on, not just in the U.S., but all over the world. I’m very encouraged by the progress we’re making.

Here’s one success story from the report, a promising new initiative and an arena in which Walmart’s progress appears to have stalled:

Walmart recycling with "super sandwich bale"

Waste: WMT has turned its garbage into an asset, just by thinking about the stuff it throws away in a more disciplined fashion. Across California, more than 80% of waste has been diverted from landfills and made into something else, turning what was a cost center into a source of new revenue.

Said Thomas: “We would pay for people to haul our trash away. And we paid to put it in a landfill. Now people are paying us.”

Success hasn’t come as easily as it sounds, of course. To help find an outlet for food waste, Walmart’s foundation donated 100 refrigerated trucks to food banks. “ Now they have a means to pick up and deliver some of the food that we can’t use in the stores, but that’s still good food,” Thomas said.

Supporting small, local farms: Last fall, WMT announced an array of targets related to agriculture. In the U.S., the company promised to double sales of locally-sourced produce, so that it accounts for 9 percent of all produce sold by the end of 2015. Globally, WMT said it will sell $1 billion in food sourced from 1 million small- and medium-sized farmers in emerging markets by the end of 2015.

To achieve those goals, Thomas told me, WMT has to simplify its supply chain to deal directly with farmers and eliminate some middlemen. “The logistics aren’t as difficult as you might think,” she said. “The farmer can actually drop off produce at the distribution center or at the store.”

If all goes according to plan, WMT  should be able to sell fresher, local food at lower prices, and eliminate some of the greenhouse gases generated by a global supply chain for food. Like the waste initiative, the agriculture initiatives mostly dovetail nicely with the culture of efficiency at Walmart.

Clean energy: To achieve its goal of being powered by 100% renewable energy, WMT has made its fleet, stores and distribution centers more efficient. But its commitment to wind and solar power  has been limited because they cost more than electricity from fossil fuels. The report says:

During FY11, we successfully completed several renewable energy projects, including the installation of 35 solar projects in Arizona, California and Puerto Rico. Eight of the solar projects installed in FY11 utilized thin-film solar, which created manufacturing jobs and accelerated this new technology’s entry to market. We installed seven fuel cell projects in California this year and completed two microturbine wind projects on the parking lot light poles at the Walmart in Worcester, Mass., and at the Sam’s Club in Palmdale, Calif.

This is all to the good. By buying renewable energy in selected markets, WMT will help bring costs down. But because wind and solar power generally cost more than electricity from coal, nuclear or natural gas in most places, WMT can’t or won’t buy clean energy on a  scale that matters. (If the company says in its report how much of its energy now comes from renewable sources, I couldn’t find it. I’d guess it’s well under 10% of  WMT’s total energy spend, but I’m ready to be corrected.) Buying renewable energy would drive up its costs, with no tangible benefits to customers, and put the company at a competitive disadvantage, as the company says in the report:

In our efforts to ensure our operations are contributing to everyday low prices for our customers, it has sometimes been difficult to find and develop low-carbon technologies that meet our ROI requirements.

This, then, is where we run up against the limits of efficiency and, more broadly, what any company can reasonably be expected to do to become more sustainable.

More broadly, it’s a reminder that the rhetoric of green business — how green is gold, how green is green, how clean energy will generate jobs and growth — hasn’t always served the cause well. Sometimes, indeed often, “green” is more expensive than “brown,” or to be more precise, the full costs of “brown” (air and water pollution, GHG emissions) aren’t captured in its price. This is why policy matters. This is why we need to price carbon emissions into the energy economy.

Put another way, so long as environmental leadership is coming from Bentonville and not Washington, we’re in trouble.

GE’s chief executive, Jeff Immelt, opened the Net Impact 2009 conference this morning at Cornell University and, as usual, he was thoughtful and provocative. He was bullish on GE, of course, but, after this tough year for the U.S. economy, he sounded more pessimistic than usual  about where the country and its economy are going.

The American consumer, the financial services industry and the construction industry were the major drivers of America’s long boom, going back to the 1980s. None is likely to drive  economic growth in the future, Immelt said.

Instead, he noted, growth will be most robust in the developing world–places like China, India and Brazil that have bounced back more quicly than the U.S. from the global downturn–and it’s by no means clear that U.S. industry is positioned to capitalize on that growth.

Immelt said:

There’s more growth outside the United States than there is inside the United States. We have to recognize that our destiny is connected to the emerging world. We have to repurpose ourselves as an exporter.

The trouble is, the U.S. isn’t educating as many engineers as it should be, he said. Nor are the U.S. government and U.S. companies investing as much as China, say, in energy research and development. Public policy. also remains a big question mark when it comes to energy because, so far at least, Congress has been unable to pass regulation of global warming pollutants. Other countries are moving faster.

“There’s going to be 10 million jobs created in clean energy,” Immelt said. The question is, will those jobs be in the U.S., in China, or elsewhere?

In the audience for Immelt were more than 2,000 members of Net Impact, a great organization whose purpose is “to inspire, educate, and equip individuals to use the power of business to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world.” (Disclosure: I’m a new member of the Net Impact board.) Immelt has made GE’s “ecomagination” campaign a hallmark of his tenure as CEO and he said his focus at the company has been to marry capitalism and sustainability.

Immelt began his conversation with the Cornell president, David Skorton, by contrasting the state of the U.S. economy when he began his career with the economy Net Impact members will find as they begin their business careers. (Note: these may not be his precise words but they are close.):

In 1982, the year I joined GE, about 10% of the earnings of the S&P 500 were in financial services. The US was a net exporter. R&D as a percentage of GDP was in the mid single digits. GE revenues were 80% in the U.S., 20% out of U.S.”

By 2007, financial services earnings as a percentage of the S&P were about 45%. The U.S. was a net importer…R&D as a percentage of GDP had slipped to about 2%.

None of these trends are good, of course. By contrast, GE continues to invest in R&D–about $3 billion in energy technology alone, Immelt said. And about 80% of GE’s revenues come from outside the U.S. His not-so-subtle message was that the U.S. needs to behave a lot more like GE. Fair point, although some GE shareholders might disagree–the company’s stock price remains well below what it was when Immelt took over in September 2001.

Some other highlights from Immelt’s talk:

He’s a bigger believer in wind power than in solar. He had resisted investing in wind at first. “The team pitched me wind for two years. I said this is a hula hoop.” But when Enron went bankrupt, and its wind business became available at a discount, Immelt figured he’d take a flyer on it. “For $200 million, how wrong can we be?” Today, wind is a $6 billion business for GE. Solar energy, he said, remains too expensive to compete, at least for now.

He’s serving President Obama, but didn’t vote for him. Immelt called himself a lifelong Republican, but he agreed to serve on the president’s Economic Advisory Board. Obama, as it happens, has been very good to GE–the company’s wind business, its investment in battery firm A123 Systems, its work on the smart grid and its research into cleaner coal all stand to benefit from administration policy.

He tries to guard against hubris. “Do we get too big and too arrogant to see what’s going on,” he said. “Arrogance is a terrible blinder.”

He still thinks green is green. He said the value that GE brings is its ability to marry capitalism and sustainability–by making and selling products and services that solve the world’s big problems.  He said: “You can build a different business model, you can solve global issues, you can impact a new set of customers and you can make money. We’re proud of that. We don’t back off that. That is who we are.”

When you need to ship a package, how do you choose between FedEx and UPS? Their services are similar, if not identical. While I’ve never compared prices, I assume they are roughly equivalent.

Could the company’s sustainability practices come into play? I’m told that they do, for select customers. Their employees care as well–people want to work for companies that are helping to solve the world’s big problems, like climate change. Regulators could also be paying attention. Whatever the explanation, FedEx and UPS are competing to become known as the most sustainable shipping company–which means we’re all winners.

FedEx's efficient Boeing 777 freighter

Mitch Jackson, who is staff director of  environmental affairs and sustainability at FedEx, met with me recently to make the case on behalf of FedEx. He says the company has identified four “building blocks” of its approach to the environment. They are:

Leadership

Innovation

Performance

Transparency

FedEx has room to improve in all four areas, he admits, but he adds, pointedly:

Importantly, FedEx is the only company in our industry striving at all four simultaneously.

Take that, Brown.

My meeting with FedEx was no accident. Last month, after interviewing a sustainability executive from UPS, I blogged about the FedEx-UPS competition. (See UPS to FedEx: We’re Greener Than You.) Understandably, FedEx asked for equal time, so I met with Jackson, a longtime FedEx executive (and speaker at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference) during his recent visit to Washington.

I can’t say that he persuaded me that FedEx is greener than UPS. You can make arguments on behalf of either firm, particularly because there’s lots of disagreement between them about what metrics to use. Newsweek’s very flawed rankings put UPS slightly ahead of FedEx. By contrast, a nonprofit called Climate Counts ranked shipping companies and gave FedEx the edge over UPS and the U.S. Post Office.

There’s also debate about who got going first when it comes to the environment. FedEx likes to talk about its ambitious and successful partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund to create a market for hybrid trucks, which began back in 2000. This, Jackson said, makes FedEx the pioneer when it comes to alternative vehicles. UPS followed, helping the market for hybrids to grow. “When UPS decided to buy some hybrid-electric vehicles, candidly, we were thrilled,” he said. UPS’s retort? They’ve been using electric cars since the 1930s.

Enough tit-for-tat. What seems clear to me after talking to Jackson is that FedEx is doing a lot of things right when it comes to sustainability. Some highlights:

Having said that, it’s clear to me that many of the steps taken by both FedEx and UPS to reduce pollution and emissions are driven more by economics — specifically, by a desire to save fuel — than by climate change worries. FedEx, for example, recently took delivery of its first Boeing 777 freighter, uses less fuel and produces fewer emissions than the rest of its fleet. Even better, it can fly from FedEx’s Memphis hub to China without having to stop for refueling in Anchorage, as its older planes do.

In the end, motivation isn’t the issue. As Jackson put it: “We try not to separate the issue of “green” from economics. They go together.”

What’s encouraging is the competition. When UPS and FedEx,  Coca Cola and PepsiCo, HP and Dell compete around “green,” the environment is better off. UPS recently took the shipping rivalry to a new level by deciding to offer customers a “green” option of paying a small fee, between 5 and 20 cents, to offset the carbon emissions of their shipping. Here’s the announcement.

Your turn, FedEx.

FedEx's Mitch Jackson

Wal-Mart will make a big announcement this week: The company, working with consumer-goods manufacturers and a group of universities, will unveil plans to measure the sustainability of every product it sells. In time, sustainability labels could provide us with information about the environmental and social attributes of consumer goods, much as nutrition labels tell us about the content of the foods we eat.

I’ve been hearing about Wal-Mart’s sustainability index for about a year, but the company has been reluctant to discuss it. (Uncharacteristically so, in my experience.) Wal-Mart’s new CEO, Mike Duke, will announce the index on Thursday, July 16, at the company’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, before invited suppliers, environmentalists and academics. I’ve been able to piece together the story by talking to Wal-Mart insiders, academics who are working with the company and environmentalists. The Big Money, Slate’s business site, has just published the story  here.

Here’s how the story begins:

PepsiCo buys lots of renewable energy, while a Coca Cola plant recycles plastic bottles. Should environmentalists drink Pepsi or Coke?

Dell is “carbon neutral.” Hewlett Packard says it designs for the environment. Whose laptops are more “green”?

So many choices, so little reliable guidance: Clorox GreenWorks or Seventh Generation? Local or organic strawberries? Paper or plastic? Who’s to say?

Wal-Mart, that’s who.

The giant retailer ($406 billion in revenues in 2008) is developing an ambitious, comprehensive and fiendishly complex plan to measure the sustainability of every product it sells. Wal-Mart has been working quietly on what it calls a “sustainability index” for more than a year, and it will take another year or two for labels to appear on products. But the company’s grand plan—“audacious beyond words” is how one insider describes it—has the potential to transform retailing, by requiring manufacturers of consumer products to dig deep into their supply chains, measure their environmental impact and compete on those terms for favorable treatment from the world’s most powerful retailer.

There is, of course, lots to say about this. One thing that needs to be clear is that Wal-Mart does not intend to own or manage this index. although the company is  driving its creation. To see who’s involved, check out the Sustainability Consortium, which is being led by faculty at the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University. Other universities have been asked to join but they are wrestling with such thorny questions as whether measuring the environmental impact of, say, a flat-screen TV qualifies as academic research and what it means for businesses including Wal-Mart to pay for the effort. One academic, who’s enthusiastic about the idea of an index, told me he’s getting questions like these from colleagues: “Are we getting hoodwinked into being a corporate shill? How can we defend this as academically legitimate research?” It’ll be interesting to see if prestigious institutions like Duke and the University of Michigan lend their imprimatur to this effort.

It probably goes without saying that measuring the environmental impact of a product is a challenge. (See my last post, An Apple Juice Puzzle.) The consortium intends to use a tool called Life Cycle Assessment, which measures production, shipping, use and disposal. The consortium website says:

The Consortium has set an initial and ambitious goal of establishing the scientific standards to measure the sustainability of consumer products and is committed to ensuring that the system it establishes is credible, transparent, and user-friendly.

Measurements of sustainability will be holistic and account for both environmental and social imperatives throughout the entire life cycle of the product including manufacture, distribution, consumer use, and post-use. These measurements will be derived from four areas: energy and climate, material efficiency, natural resources, and people and community.

Notice the reference there to “social imperatives.” Wal-Mart wants “people and communities” to be part of the index, meaning that such squishy questions as wages and factory conditions in the developing world will have to be factored into the accounting. “There are all sorts of thorny issues,” an insider says. “Do you use U.S. working standards in the developing world?”

Matt Kistler, Wal-Mart’s sustainability leader, has a presentation on the website that makes for interesting reading. He says the objectives of the index are to:

Facilitate selection of an exciting basket of preferred products

Drive innovation and continuous improvement

Continuously track Walmart’s supply chain performance

Empower Walmart’s buyers/suppliers and make them accountable

On that last point, his presentation includes a list of 16 specific questions for Wal-Mart suppliers–as I recall, the company has about 60,000 suppliers–asking if they have measured their greenhouse gas emissions, set public targets for reducing waste, tracked the origin of the things they make and managed social compliance at their factories. No wonder the consumer goods makers are nervous about the index, my sources tell me.

The index, Kistler says, is being designed to “create a race to the top.”

If all goes according to plan, this will be be an amazing race to watch.

Whatever you think of the people at Greenpeace, you’ve got to admit they are environmentalists with a sense of humor. Recently, Greenpeace published a scorecard that ranks supermarket chains on the sustainability of their seafood. It’s a serious analysis, intended to guide shoppers to those stores that recognize their responsibility to protect the oceans, and to pressure those stores that don’t. In the argot of activists, this is known as a “name ‘em and shame ‘em” strategy.

Then Greenpeace went a step further. It ridiculed Trader Joe’s, the national supermarket chain with the lowest ranking, by creating a website called Traitor Joe’s (“Your one-stop shop for ocean destruction”), producing an amusing video (below and at www.traitorjoe.com) and sending protesters dressed as Orange Roughy to a Trader Joe’s outlet in San Francisco, calling on the company to clean up its act.

While these tactics might not be well suited for, say, the World Resources Institute, the diversity of the environmental movement is a wonderful thing. Activists at groups like Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network or Friends of the Earth function, in essence, as the business development arms of the more collaborative, mainstream groups like the Environmental Defense Fund or Conservation International. Companies under  attack from Greenpeace or RAN often ask EDF or CI to help them dig out of trouble.

I didn’t write much about Greenpeace while my wife, Karen Schneider, worked there, but she has since moved on (to become a vice president for communications at the National Women’s Law Center), so I feel more comfortable reporting on Greenpeace. The Greenpeace gang can be aggressive—they oppose the Waxman-Markey climate change bill because, they say, it’s too weak to deal effectively with the threat of global warming—but to the surprise of some, they have also collaborated effectively with companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever, around the issue of HFC-free refrigerants. And they do solid research.

Greenpeace’s seafood study, called Carting Away the Oceans: How Grocery Stores are Emptying the Seas, is worth a look.  It ranks 20 supermarket companies and assesses their seafood policies (if any), initiatives they are taking to promote sustainability (again, if any), their approach to labeling, and their sales of so-called “red list” fish, meaning  fish that Greenpeace deems imperiled or those that come from fisheries that harm sea turtles, dolphins, seals, sea lions, or other marine mammals. Red list fish include, among others, Atlantic Cod, Atlantic haddock, Atlantic salmon, Atlantic sea scallops, Chilean sea bass, grouper, monkfish, ocean quahog, Orange Roughy, red snapper, redfish, skates, South Atlantic albacore tuna, swordfish, tropical shrimp and yellowfin tuna. (For another look at what seafood to buy and why, see the Seafood Watch list published by the Monterey Bay Acquarium.)

Fortunately, there is some good news in Greenpeace’s scorecard, its third since 2008. More than half of the  supermarket chains in the U.S. have made some progress in increasing the sustainability of their seafood operations, the group says. The Wegman’s chain received Greenpeace’s top ranking followed by Ahold USA, while Whole Foods dropped to third place from its first-place finish last December. Wal-Mart ranks No. 7. On the plus side, the report says:

Greenpeace is delighted to announce that several of the companies included in this report have not only shown great improvement, but continue to move toward being the first large-scale “green” seafood retailers in the United States. Interestingly, each store has found avenues within its unique business model to move toward a more sustainable way of sourcing and selling seafood. Examples of this kind of innovation are evident in the actions of retailers like Wegmans, Ahold, Whole Foods, and Target, each of which has made great strides in various areas.

But the report also chides the laggards, saying:

…there remain nine retailers that have made no visible effort whatsoever to increase the sustainability of their seafood operations. These industry laggards continue to wreak havoc on our environment, with no apparent regard for the health of our ecosystems or the values of their customers.

At this point, Greenpeace has little choice but to call out these gross offenders for who they are, and to strongly urge all consumers to avoid buying seafood from the following retailers: Aldi, Costco, Giant Eagle, H. E. B., Meijer, Price Chopper, Publix, Trader Joe’s, and Winn-Dixie.

Thus, the protest below at a Trader Joe’s in San Francisco:

Greenpeace protesters dressed as Orange Roughy at a Trader Joe's