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.