E-Sourcing Forum » Going green the Wal-Mart way

Going green the Wal-Mart way

January 23rd, 2007 at 06:38am David Bush - Iasta

So, Wal-Mart is not typical on any level or relative to any comparable, but I did find a recent article in Apparel Magazine interesting, nonetheless. Check this data from the retail giant:

Wal-Mart reports that it will save nearly $26 million, will conserve 10 million gallons of diesel fuel and will prevent 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere as a result of its “no idle” policy for its trucks and the new high-efficiency generators with which they were retrofitted. Also, as part of its sandwich bale program, 150 truckloads of shrink-wrap plastic were collected and recycled in the first quarter of 2006 alone. This kept the plastic out of landfills and generated $1.1 million in recycling revenue.

In addition, Wal-Mart estimates that it saved 5000 trees and 1300 barrels of fuel by changing the size of the package on a private label toy. It also reduced the amount of fuel used in the transportation due to higher unit quantities per full truckload.

Of course, these numbers are staggering when you have revenue that outpaces the economy of entire countries such as Belgium and Ukraine. I do think these advancements in green policies and purchasing are fascinating, however. Gone are the days of having to make huge sacrifices in efficiency and cost for the sake of environmental responsibility.

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Entry Filed under: General, Global Supply Issues/Risk

1 Comment Add your own

1. David Rotor | January 23rd, 2007 at 10:45 am

David,

I agree that the days are long gone that environmental purchasing means subsidizes. I worked on a project for a national retailer back in 2003/4 that has over 3,000 stores in North America. The biggest savings we generated came from a similar project to the Walmart recycling you mention. In their case we advised them to invest $6M into OCC (cardboard) crusher/balers into each of their Regional Distrubtion Centers. We then used the “dead head” capacity in their trucks that delivered clothes to the stores to bring OCC back to the DC’s. Back then we weren’t thinking carbon loads but, including strategic sourcing savings from moving from 100’s of garbage haulers to 7, we reduced their waste removal budget from a $12M cost to a $3M profit.

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