Just in time for St. Patrick's day, there's a new player in the marketing trend that has notorious corporate offenders energetically painting themselves green in order to entice the growth sector represented by environmentally concerned consumers. Walmart, it seems, wants its piece of the green pie.
This trend toward "green-washing," has already seen some real whoppers (like the oxymoronic "clean coal") floated out there in its opening salvos. The marketing concept is simple: if you get ahead of your PR problem and re-brand your product or business model to sound environmentally responsible, there is a good chance that this new image will be accepted and reinforced by consumers before naysayer's can force them to learn the awful truth. Then it's game over because the marketplace has a notoriously short attention span for the onerous details.
Is Walmart getting a pass from much of the environmental community who should be giving it's green claims greater scrutiny?
In a new blog-post Stacy Mitchell (The Big Box Swindle), Senior Researcher for the New Rules Project scolds environmental groups for failing to take a closer look at Walmart's recent attempts to green-up their corporate image:
So, on the one hand, you have Wal-Mart's sustainability program, which proposes to reduce the emissions associated with some of the products it sells. And, on the other hand, you have Wal-Mart's core business model, which ensures that we have to replace those products far more often. This is where some of our most prominent environmental groups have really failed us. They've loudly cheered Wal-Mart's every green announcement, but have done little to help us understand or prod the company to confront the deep sustainability issues that are at the heart of its business model.
Mitchell points to Walmart's relentless practice of consuming vast tracts of farmland and wildlife habitat to site it's supercenters, accessible only by automobile, and the seas of parking lots that accompany them. By effectively smothering local competitors that customers might access on foot, Walmart's ultimate success hinges on forcing consumers to get into their cars to purchase even a carton of milk.
Wal-Mart has carefully defined the parameters of sustainability to avoid running up against the basic formula of how it operates and grows. Glaringly absent from Wal-Mart's recent sustainability report, for example, is any mention of sprawl or land use. There's no discussion of how much undeveloped, carbon-absorbing habitat its big stores consume each year, even as the nation's supply of both developed retail space and abandoned "greyfields" mushrooms to epic proportions.
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