LITTLE ROCK — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. reaffirmed Thursday that it is committed to reducing the environmental impact of its operations around the globe.
The occasion was the company’s Global Sustainability Milestone Meeting at company headquarters in Bentonville, an event that was carried live online as a webcast.
Mike Duke, president and chief executive officer, said that when the company launched a series of environmental initiatives in 2009, it was told that the effort would “really be complicated” and that getting others, including suppliers, to agree on the goals would be difficult.
“I’m glad we did it. And it did take a lot of work,” he said. “This is a worldwide effort that Wal-Mart is embarking on.”
Among the company’s stated goals is to ultimately produce zero waste in its operations.
“We’ve made amazing progress on that,” Duke said. “But we still have a long ways to go.”
In the long term, he said, customers will expect products to be grown or produced in an environmentally responsible way, and that it will take all of the company’s merchants and other operations “to achieve these audacious goals.”
Michelle Harvey, senior project manager for retail for the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, said Wal-Mart’s message to its own buyers and to suppliers “sets a new level of expectations.”
“What’s really encouraging to us is that sustainability is now a part of the evaluation of the merchants, part of their job performance,” said Harvey, who is based in Bentonville.
Wal-Mart’s environmental initiatives launched in 2005 and 2006 under former Chief Executive Lee Scott initially generated a lot of energy, she said. When Duke took over, she said, “cheerleading” wasn’t his style and some in the rank-and-file at Wal-Mart questioned whether sustainability was still a priority.
“This tells merchants, we don’t want to go backward,” she said. “We’re really very excited about the direction things have been going since the first of the year.”
Leslie Dach, Wal-Mart executive vice president for corporate affairs, said the company realized early on in its sustainability push that it didn’t have all the answers, so it partnered with nongovernmental organizations to share knowledge and “give us a little push.”
“They’ve held our feet to the fire,” he said.
Among those organizations was the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation organization. Carter Roberts, president and chief executive of the organization, said during the webcast that the organization’s role “has changed dramatically from when I started in this field.”
Initially, he said, the focus was on issues such as saving polar bears. But local action only goes so far when global forces are at work, he said, and if you don’t engage business, you won’t succeed in the long run.
“We have seen the limits of government in solving these problems,” he said.
Key issues for his organization, he said, are climate change and resource scarcity, and the impact that has on business and consumers.
“Feeding the people without destroying the planet is probably our biggest challenge,” he said.
Doug McMillon, president and chief executive of Wal-Mart International, said that on a recent visit to the company’s operations in Brazil, he was reminded of the company’s broad reach.
A school the company helped fund taught students about business and has seen a 65 percent increase in participation since 2010. Eighty percent of students in the programs get jobs, many of whom were from impoverished homes and “didn’t have a chance,” he said.
The company, he said, has established 246 recycling stations which employ more than 1,000 people.
Camille Valverde, sustainability director for Wal-Mart Brazil, said 17 percent of the Amazon region has been deforested, and that clear-cutting to raise cattle is the reason for 60 percent of the clearing. Wal-Mart Brazil, she said, asks beef suppliers to trace the product back to the farm, an effort to avoid encouraging further deforestation.
Wal-Mart’s stock closed Thursday at $75.14, up $1.07, or 1.4 percent. It has traded between $49.94 and $75.24 in the past year.
Business, Pages 27 on 09/14/2012