Green Wombat

Wal-Mart (WMT) chief H. Lee Scott said today that the retail giant would work with suppliers to make their manufacturing processes less dependent on planet-warming fossil fuels. Scott announced Wal-Mart’s "Sustainability 360" initiative at a speech in London. He also said Wal-Mart is collaborating with suppliers to shrink the amount of product packaging by 5 percent by 2013. "Think about the multiplier effect of more than 60,000 suppliers around the world," Scott told the audience in his lecture at the Prince of Wales’s Business & the Environment Programme. "The impact of this packaging effort will be equal to removing 213,000 trucks from the road, and saving about 324,000 tons of coal and 67 million gallons of diesel fuel per year. We believe this effort could save the global supply chain nearly $11 billion. Our supply chain alone could save $3.4 billion." As part of the company green offensive, Scott announced a new "ethical sourcing initiative."  The company will work with suppliers to help them use environmentally sound manufacturing processes.  He cited the case of a Brazilian candy maker that wasn’t properly disposing of waste water. "So our auditors sat down with the factory’s management, explained that sustainability can be profitable, and made recommendations," Scott said, according to a transcript of the speech posted on Wal-Mart’s site. "These managers were skeptical, but they took on the challenge. The next time we visited the factory, we saw a new waste management program." He said 200 Wal-Mart staffers are working on the initiative. Scott also noted that 45 percent of the toilet paper sold in the company’s U.K. stores comes from timber certified as sustainable. "Eventually, we want to use only sustainable timber and pulp-based products to manufacture our brands," he said.