OLIVE EARTH

In February 2004, during a private trip to Coco Island, Peter Seligmann, co-founder and CEO of Conservation International, impressed upon Rob Walton, the eldest son of Sam Walton and chairman of Wal-Mart that Wal-Mart could have great influence on environment protection by influencing its vast customer and supplier base much more than whatever the family foundation was contributing toward environment protection. In October 2005 Wal Mart CEO Lee Scott called for three broad goals: to be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy, to create zero waste and to sell products that sustain people and the environment. Since then they continue to be tracking (36 of 38 goals in the last count).

Walmart with its massive operations, digest this, weekly customer count of 176 million across 5,300 stores, $401 billion in revenue, the company is bigger than 160 nations, China's eighth-largest trading partner, it has a truly transformative power in shaping the future of carbon footprint by its definitive action. In 2009 reduced plastic bag waste globally by about 66.5 million pounds, which is the equivalent of approximately 4.8 billion shopping bags. This represents a 16.1 percent reduction. Currently Wal Mart is working on finding a safe and suitable replacement for PVC to eliminate it from their private brand packaging. Walmart actually brought of lifecycle analysis and supply-chain emissions tracking to the forefront and announced during mid-July 2009 that it would be developing a "Sustainability Index" which would in no small way require its suppliers, all 100,000 of them, to measure sustainability as part of the overall supply chain. Walmart targeted to reduce 5% packaging in all its products by 2013 over 2006 levels estimated at saving US$ 11 billion across companies supply chain. In 2008, Walmart introduced Sustainable Packaging Scorecard that was aimed at getting suppliers to reduce packaging in their products, reducing negative environmental impact of packaging. The scorecard had attributes called the '7 R's of Packaging'– Remove, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Renew, Revenue, and Read.

In July 2009, Walmart began the development of a sustainable product index called the Sustainability Index to provide its manufacturers, vendors and customers the tools to make more sustainable decisions in a standard way. As the first step Sustainability Index, Walmart asked its suppliers to complete the Supplier Sustainability Assessment – a set of 15 questions that gauges how individual suppliers are facing sustainability, highlights those which will be instrumental to Walmart’s development of a greener supply chain and identifies suppliers needing support in their pursuit of a more sustainable business. The long term vision of this index is to use the information generated from Walmart’s supply chain to develop an end-customer-facing tool that will provide customers with the rating for every product based on the product’s environmental impact.