Can Wal-Mart Ever Be 'Green'?

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With its recent flurry of green initiatives, Wal-Mart has won the embrace of several prominent environmental groups. "If they do even half what they say they want to do, it will make a huge difference for the planet," said Ashok Gupta of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Environmental Defense, meanwhile, has deemed Wal-Mart's actions momentous enough to warrant opening an office near the retailer's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. "If [we] can nudge Wal-Mart in the right direction on the environment, we can have a huge impact," said the organization's executive vice president, David Yarnold.

Wal-Mart's eco-commitments are not without substance. The two most significant are a pledge to make its stores 20 percent more energy efficient by 2013, which will cut annual electricity use by 3.5 million megawatt-hours, and a plan to double the fuel economy of its trucks by 2015, which will save 60 million gallons of diesel fuel a year.

Acting with unusual transparency, Wal-Mart has even published a benchmark calculation of its carbon footprint. The company estimates that its U.S. operations were responsible for 15.3 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2005. About three-quarters of this pollution came from the electricity generated to power its stores.

This cannot be dismissed as greenwashing. It's actually far more dangerous than that. Wal-Mart's initiatives have just enough meat to have distracted much of the environmental movement, along with most journalists and many ordinary people, from the fundamental fact that, as a system of distributing goods to people, big-box retailing is as intrinsically unsustainable as clear-cut logging is as a method of harvesting trees.

Here's the key issue. Wal-Mart's carbon estimate omits a massive source of CO2 that is inherent to its operations and amounts to more than all of its other greenhouse-gas emissions combined: the CO2 produced by customers driving to its stores.

The dramatic growth of big-box retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot, over the last 15 years has been mirrored by an equally dramatic rise in how many miles we travel running errands. Between 1990 and 2001 (the most recent year for which the U.S. Department of Transportation has data), the number of miles that the average American household drove each year for shopping grew by more than 40 percent.

New Wal-Mart documentary may be a sign of upheavals to come It's not that we are going to the store more often, but rather that each trip is an average of about two miles longer. The general trend toward suburbanization is only partly to blame: shopping-related driving grew three times as fast as driving for all other purposes. The culprit is big-box retail. These companies have displaced tens of thousands of neighborhood and downtown businesses and consolidated the necessities of life into massive stores that aggregate car-borne shoppers from large areas.

During the 1990s, for example, about 5,000 independent hardware stores, dispersed across almost as many neighborhoods, were replaced by just 1,500 Home Depot and Lowe's superstores, most erected on the outer fringes of our cities. The same trend is under way in virtually every retail sector. According to the market research firm Retail Forward, every time Wal-Mart converts one of its stores into a Supercenter with groceries, it leads to the closure of two existing grocery stores, leaving many residents with farther to drive for milk and bread.

Altogether, by 2001, Americans logged over 330 billion miles going to and from the store, generating more than 140 million metric tons of CO2. If we conservatively estimate that shopping-related driving over the last five years grew at only half the rate of the 1990s, that means Americans are now driving more than 365 billion miles each year and producing 154 million metric tons of CO2 in the process.