Following on from recent posts about greenwash and whether big businesses are doing enough, the Harvard Business Review has posted a blog about green metrics. They ask the question:
Who's greener: a computer manufacturer with revenues of $61 billion planting a tree for every computer sold, or the world's largest retailer with revenues of $380 billion demanding environmental transparency and performance improvements from all of its suppliers?
The authors - Nicholas Eisenberger and Mateo Bueno - think it's clear: it's the second one which, in fact, is WalMart. The first company - Dell - is making emissions offsets yet it pales into insignificance to the impact WalMart will have. Yet, Newsweek argued Dell was ahead of WalMart. Why? According to the authors it was because Newsweek were using a flawed metric on measuring on who was doing less bad.
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Wallmart (along with a lot of other large companies) have been working with the Carbon Disclosure Project where a friend of mine works. Their website is here:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cdproject.net/en-US/Pages/HomePage.aspx
I guess that this is the kind of work that some of the students on this course want to go into.
As the website says, it is another approach to the idea that 'what gets measured, gets managed'
The extent to which such a process can promote change is, I guess, still debatable.
Walmart is going beyond measuring scope 1 and 2 of carbon emissions. It is trying to measure its scope 3 emissions. It's asked all its suppliers for their products' lifecycle carbon footprint.
ReplyDeleteWalmart will then create a database and label their goods. This is way beyond the Carbon Discloure Project and affects 60 000 (mainly) small businesses. If these small businesses change their behaviour, the impact is huge as this will mean a dividend for other retailers who also buy from these suppliers. In turn, these retailers are likely to follow Walmart's example.
See http://walmartstores.com/Sustainability/9292.aspx for more details.
Get big business to change and you will get quicker change than trying to mobilise the citizens of a country to reduce emissions.
I don't doubt that big business has a key role to play in reducing emissions, its just that there is a nagging voice in my head about Wal-Mart forcing their supply chain to follow their example. I think that it reminds me of the way in which supermarkets are accused of bullying their supply chains. I think that I also have some scepticism due to the wealth of books and websites which document their mal-practice in a wide range of areas. Can leopards change their spots?
ReplyDeleteAlso, one has to question whether you can 'de-carbonise' the kind of mass consumption that Wal-Mart's sole purpose of existance.
Anyway, I also found this rather neat website which shows the spread of wal-mart in the US
http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/