The Green Parent

Wal-Mart is about to change the way we go shopping.

As the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart has earned quite a reputation for their rock-bottom price tags (and the questionable strategies they use to attain those prices.)  But in the future, those price tags may also be accompanied by another label…a green label that gives consumers information about the product’s carbon footprint…the energy and water used to create it, and the pollution left in its wake.

Wal-Mart is apparently on a mission to determine the social and environmental impact of every item it puts on its shelves. And it has recruited scholars, suppliers, and environmental groups to help it create an electronic indexing system to do that.  Their goal is to create a universal rating system over the next 5 years that scores products based on how environmentally and socially sustainable they are.  And down the road they hope that other retailers will adopt their green labeling system as well.

“We have to change how we make and sell products.  We have to make consumption itself smarter and sustainable,” Michael T. Duke, Wal-Mart’s president and chief executive, told about 1,500 of the company’s suppliers and employees on Thursday at a “sustainability meeting.”

I know, I know, it seems a little scary that Wal-Mart may control the future of green labeling.  The potential for greenwashing is astronomical.  But so is the potential that something incredibly good could come out of this.  Let’s face it, nobody else is doing it…and as the mega-giant of world consumption, Wal-Mart is about the only company that could pull this off.

via the New York Times

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