Walmart puts more muscle in their sustainability score cards

Walmart is pressing their vendors for even more sustainability data. Developed with the help of the Sustainability Consortium, the new score cards go beyond the 15 questions of the original Sustainability Index and dig much deeper into category specific information. The scorecards will cover 100 categories with more to be rolled out in 2013. Walmart states that vendors who produce positive sustainability results will be rewarded, but those that lag will have to face "family meetings" and the results will be incorporated in to buyer reviews. So far it seems that the sustainability guidelines, although data driven, have been fairly benign in terms of purchasing impacts. Do you think these new score cards will add teeth to Walmart's sustainability initiative? Will score cards spread to other members of the Sustainability Consortium?

Green Biz has a great article on their newest version of the sustainability score card:

If other retailer members (of the Sustainability Consortium,) such as Safeway, Marks & Spencer and Best Buy, develop similar scorecard programs, consumer product sustainability will be pushed to record heights... “The move to build sustainability into the merchandising side of the business is a game changer for the consumer products industry.”

...For each category, suppliers will be ranked according to sustainability progress and action items. Scorecard items will include many of the traditional questions for greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency and waste, but will also include questions relevant to each category. For example, for laptops, the surveys will include questions about the energy used during component manufacturing and chemical exposure to workers; for laundry detergent, the surveys will ask about cold-water-wash messaging
and chemical ingredients.

Read more at GreenBiz

Learn more about Walmart's Sustainability Index

Or check out the Sustainability Consortium

Getting the Most Out of Walmart's 15 questions

Walmart's 15 questions seem simple enough, but behind these easy questions lies a lot of deeper analysis and goal setting. From Green Biz, here are some tips: 

Walmart's 15 questions can be boiled down to 3 simple ones:

1. Do you measure and set goals for your environmental impacts?
2. If so, what impacts are you measuring, what are your goals, and are they consistent with recognized standards?
3. Do you know if your suppliers are doing the same?

Here's a simple, proven approach for getting started:

1. Set environmental impact baselines: Establish energy, carbon, water, and waste baselines against which progress can be measured.
2. Establish impact reduction goals: Align environmental impact data with broader business operations and set reduction goals that drive both cost and environmental outcomes.
3. Prioritize reduction initiatives: Choose and implement initiatives that will yield the greatest progress against your goals.
4. Track and report progress: Measure progress of reduction initiatives relative to baseline and goals using Greenhouse Gas Protocol or Global Reporting Initiative methodologies.
5. Publicize success: Convey your progress to external stakeholders through company sustainability reports and external venues such as the Carbon Disclosure Project or Ceres.

Read more at GreenBiz.com

Walmart Brazil explains "end to end" product life cycle thinking

...At Walmart Brazil, one of the many sustainability initiatives that we've begun is our End-to-End Project, which analyzes the entire life cycle of select consumer products to reduce their environmental impact. We began End-to-End three years ago because we wanted to make the products our customers are buying more sustainable. At the time, many of our suppliers weren't aware of the benefits that come from greener products, and we wanted to help them integrate more sustainable practices in their businesses. We initiated a partnership with Cetea, the Packaging Technology Center, related to the Food Technology Institute, ITAL, to study products from the sourcing of raw materials to disposal of the waste after consumption. What we accomplished produced groundbreaking results....

...After the first round of End-to-End, suppliers were satisfied, improvements were being made to even more products across our supply chain, and sales of the improved products increased significantly, which tells us that customers want greener choices. In the second round of product analysis, improvements were made to 13 more products. In fact, so many suppliers wanted to participate in the second round that we had to turn several away because we wanted to focus on making the selected products the best they could be...

This guest post was written by Camila Valverde, Director of Sustainability, Walmart Brazil.

Read more at Treehugger