2Sustain

Top retailers like Walmart, Tesco and Marks & Spencer are asking their suppliers to report on sustainability programs and provide customers with “greener” products, and now consumer goods companies are scrambling for ways to respond to these rapidly evolving lists of requirements.

Yesterday, Five Winds International, one of North America’s largest and most experienced consulting firms devoted to sustainability management, launched a website to help. The company researched retailers’ programs and developed specific tools to help suppliers understand how to get ahead of retailers’ requirements.
Designed specifically for brand managers and sustainability managers at consumer goods manufacturers, the new website includes: (more…)

Yesterday, Walmart announced a goal to eliminate 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from its global supply chain by the end of 2015.

The footprint of Walmart’s global supply chain is many times larger than its operational footprint, and so it represents a much more significant opportunity to reduce emissions. In fact, the ambitious goal announced yesterday represents one and a half times the company’s estimated global carbon footprint growth over the next five years and is the equivalent of taking more than 3.8 million cars off the road for a year.

Walmart collaborated with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to develop this innovative approach which looks at the supply chain on a global scale. After all, as the EDF website says:

Walmart’s supply chain is where the action is. It’s the biggest possible lever that Walmart could bring to the table. Walmart will work with suppliers to reduce their emissions – which they otherwise might not do – resulting in positive ripple effects around the globe.

This new program to reduce GHGs has three main components: (more…)

Many companies remain somewhat perplexed by the term “greening the supply chain,” and so Walmart is giving all its private brand suppliers a CD set to help explain life-cycle assessment (LCA) and other sustainability initiatives.

The CDs are a compilation of edits from the series ‘Ecological Awareness,’ which was originally released by More Than Sound Productions. The new CD set is an introductory, made-for-business audio series called “The Radical Horizon: A Primer on Business Sustainability.”
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The World Resources Institute (WRI) is beefing up its efforts to help companies green their supply chains, thanks to a $420,000 grant from Walmart.

WRI’s Green Supply Chain Initiative will develop and deploy a new set of accounting tools to measure the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts of a company’s supply chain and the products that are sold to customers. These tools will be based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard, which is an international accounting standard used by businesses to identify, calculate and report their own emissions. It was developed by the WRI and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in 1998.
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Back in July, one insider described Walmart’s Sustainable Product Index as “audacious beyond words.”

But these days, suppliers are substituting other adjectives.

Many think this new Walmart initiative is “confusing beyond words” or “intimidating beyond words” or … well, you get the idea.
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