Wal-Mart Announces Sustainable Index
Walmart just announced that will be developing a sustainable product index in coordination with all of it’s suppliers. This new index will allow the company to determine how eco-friendly each of the products is. Walmart president and CEO Mike Duke had this to say about why they are developing this new index:
And increasingly they want information about the entire lifecycle of a product so they can feel good about buying it. They want to know that the materials in the product are safe, that it was made well and that it was produced in a responsible way.
Wal-Mart will introduce the project with three phases:
- Provide a survey to all of it’s suppliers throughout the world to determine their sustainability.
- Bring together suppliers, retailers and governments in a consortium start developing a database containing the complete lifecycle of projects. This will include all phases a product goes through, starting from the raw materials used to create it all the way until it is thrown away.
- Take the product information from the consortium and translate it into an index easily deciphered by us the consumers.
Wal-Mart is providing initial funding for many of the efforts, but hopes that suppliers and retailer also contribute. The intial surveying process is set to end by October and the entire project will end within the next few years. The impacts of such an index could affect how all products throughout our country are labeled. Wal-Mart seems like the best candidate to bring about a change like this. There is still some uncertainanty in the details of this project and it will be interesting to see how things unfold. I am not a huge fan of Wal-Mart and don’t shop there, but they do have the sheer size to make a change like this happen. Let’s hope that this change allows consumers to actually make the correct choices and not mislead us into purchasing products that are not as environmentally friendly as they may seem.
What are your thoughts on this new sustainable index?
