This is huge

Walmart is rolling out a labeling program for its 100,000 suppliers worldwide to make them track environmental and social impacts of their products. It will be like a nutrition label for CSR. Apparently “scholars, suppliers and environmental groups” to establish the standards.

Wal-Mart’s goal is to have other retailers eventually adopt the indexing system, which will be created over the next five years.

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

The only thing less likely than a Wal-Mart meeting that sounds as if it were dreamed up by liberal-arts environmentalists may be that a number of scholars and environmental groups say that Wal-Mart is the only entity capable of making “sustainable consumption” a retailing reality.

“Nobody else could pull this off,” said Michelle Harvey atEnvironmental Defense Fund, one of the groups involved in the creation of the index.

The question, of course, is whether even Wal-Mart can make it happen.

And, where will they set the bar for the standards? Low enough that everyone gets in and it becomes greenwashing? Or high enough that they actually make a difference for an increasingly ecologically pressured future? Either way, it is going to have a huge impact.

Related articles:

• http://earth2tech.com/2009/07/16/wal-marts-green-rating-a-boon-for-carbon-management-software/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/business/energy-environment/16walmart.html

Speaking at Sustainable Brands Conference

Myself and a couple of colleagues — Sara Louise Todd and Mary Anne Masterston — will be running a workshop as part of the Sustainable Brands Conference in Monterey, CA, in early June. The line-up of speakers is impressive, including frog’s own Robert Fabricant talking about Project M. If you’re into this area and are in the fortunate position of having a travel/conference budget, it should be a good conference.

They haven’t updated the workshop description yet from the original one we sent them before we’d finalized the workshop agenda, so here are more details. Our workshop is coming at the end of the conference, so we are using as an opportunity to help people frame the ideas they’ve been hearing/thinking about into something actionable:

What do you do on Monday morning?

How do you convert the ideas and examples you’ve been hearing about in the previous days into action in your own organization? How do you synthesize everything you’ve absorbed into something comprehensive and meaningful to your company? How does what you’ve learned this week apply directly to your company’s long-term goals?

Using our frogThinkTM creative work session methods, we’ll take you through a series of activities that will assist you in applying your inspired energy from the week into actionable goals. This will be a high energy, hands-on, collaborative workshop, out of which you will get a distilled set of ideas and next steps, written down in a form to be easily shared with others on Monday morning.

Using a series of provocations we will help you explore the long-term positioning of your brand. Next we will provide approaches to define the first steps in getting you there, acknowledging the challenging economic client in the near-term. Activities will be team-based, but your take-a-ways will be focused directly on your individual needs and circumstance.

Friedman: The Inflection is Near

In his column today, Thomas Friedman asks much the same question that I did a month ago: can we have an economy without the patterns of spending based off cheap labor and false credit, and which pillages the earth’s resources unthinkingly?

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …

We can’t do this anymore.

Read more >

Trendwatch: Eco Bounty

Trendwatching.com has their new monthly trend up: Eco Bounty

They argue that despite fears over green-washing and the recession, eco is here to stay, simply because of the huge financial returns that it offers for companies that can crack the code for their particular domain.

“ECO-BOUNTY refers to the numerous opportunities, both short and long term, for brands that participate in the epic quest for a sustainable society. Some of these opportunities exist despite the current recession, others are fueled by it, not in the least because of new rules and regulations. Downturn-obsessed brands who lose their eco-focus will find themselves left out in the cold when the global economy starts recovering.”

Lots of good stuff in it, read it here.

Green Supercomputers

Supercomputers use power at a prodigious rate, as do all large IT installations, and the topic of energy saving is the biggest one in IT circles these days. Here’s an interesting article that talks about IBM’s supercomputers and what they’ve done to make them more energy efficient. IBM made some particularly smart decisions almost ten years ago when architecting its current generation of chips and machines that are paying off big dividends today.

Some excerpts:

The top 20 greenest supercomputers are all built on IBM technology, and 39 of the top 50 use IBM technology as well.

[Dave] Turek, [IBM’s VP of Deep Computing] told me that’s no accident, and that it’s a result of decisions that IBM made back in 1999, when it had to make basic decisions about its next generation of supercomputers. The company was quite prescient about projecting the current energy crunch, and so decided that it would build its new supercomputers on an architecture that would be as energy-efficient as possible.

“Because of that,” Turek says, “our supercomputers are two to three times more energy-efficient that other supercomputers with the equivalent processing power.”

This is of more than academic interest —- there’s a great deal of savings involved. Turek provides some eye-opening back-of-the-envelope calculations that show just how much money can be saved when using a green supercomputer. 

He says that in some parts of the U.S. energy costs are 10 cents per kilowatt hour, while in some places in Europe, the costs are two and a half times that. A green supercomputer, compared to a non-green one, can save up to $2 million in energy costs a year in the U.S. and $5 million a year in Europe. 

“Many people keep these systems running for a very long time,” he says, “sometimes for as long as 15 years.”

The result? A potential savings of $75 million in energy costs over the lifetime of a supercomputer in Europe.

Keep reading >