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BUSINESS

Walmart, Carbon, and Lessons for Woolworths

Leighton Jenkins's picture

In the USA Walmart have found a way to leverage their buying power to make a significant impact on their carbon footprint. Could Tesco in the UK and Woolworths in Australia implement the same model? 

The recent announcement by Walmart to reduce its carbon footprint has thrown down the challenge to other global retailers such as the UK’s Tesco and Australia’s Woolworths. Until this announcement all three essentially had drawn an imaginary wall around their business and set targets that were, a) related to their direct property and operations, b) therefore under their direct control. A diagram from the Tesco site shows this quite clearly.

The Walmart announcement goes much further whereby they announced that they would remove 20m metric tons of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Global Supply Chain by 2015. This is new and different as they will now work with their suppliers and look at  the entire lifecycle of a product, from sourcing of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, customer use to end-of-life disposal.

Walmart will work with its suppliers to indentify the largest opportunities and address them. It won’t all be easy as it needs to prove that the supplier would not have undertaken some action under their own reduction programmes. 

It's back to work but is anybody there?!

Clive Leach's picture

Presenteeism, or lack of productive engagement at work, is prevalent at huge cost to both the public and private sectors. Research shows that well-being and resilience interventions can support sustained employee engagement and organisational success.

The market fever index

patrickcallioni's picture

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les pickett's picture

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Jim McKerlie's picture

The NBN will impact business, but for Australia to get a ROI on this nation building investment, Government will need to consider more than upgrading the cables. 

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Martin Hosking's picture

Ironically in our image obsessed world beauty for its own sake is undervalued.

 

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iggypintado's picture

Apart from feeling chuffed, becoming the first player in the social media space to appear on the front cover of a mainstream business magazine in Australia has got Iggy Pintado thinking about what this milestone signals.

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Jessica Borg's picture

The World Society for the Protection of Animals argues that chilled meat exports are a more economically sustainable option for Australian industry than cruel live animal shipments.

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Andrew Jones's picture

Establishing and financing soil carbon programmes may rest heavily on the possibility to include them in emissions trading. 

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Raul Caceres's picture

Leaders from the private, public and not-for-profit sector need to talk to one another to create opportunities to collaborate for social innovation. It can make everybody's job easier, more fulfilling and more effective.