http://groups.yahoo.com/group/carfree_cities/message/10300
NEAL PEIRCE COLUMN
For Release Sunday, June 24, 2007
© 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
‘GREEN’ WALMART: AN OXYMORON?
By Neal Peirce
WalMart has been harvesting kudos for its dramatic “green” promises. Even
Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council have gone on
record praising the massive retailer’s intentions to reduce electricity usage in
its stores 20 percent by 2013 and to double the fuel economy of its trucks by
2015.
But author-activist Stacy Mitchell has tossed a firecracker into the
WalMart-environmentalist lovefest. In a Grist magazine article and subsequent
interview, she acknowledges that WalMart’s commitments are no mere
“greenwashing” -- that they will in fact save substantial electricity, oil and
carbon impact.
But the green moves miss the mega-point, insists Mitchell, author of the recent
book “Big-Box Swindle.” WalMart along with such chains as Target and Home
Depot divert customers from close-in neighborhood or town shopping to the outer
fringes of metro areas.
In fact the big retail boxes have displaced tens of thousands of neighborhood
and downtown businesses and focused the necessities of life into huge stores
that draw car-borne shoppers from large areas. Longer and longer drives are
necessary to buy milk or bread, pick up a container of paint or a lawnmower
part.
A principal result: shopping-related driving grew by a stunning 40 percent,
three times as fast as driving for all purposes, from 1990 to 2001 (the last
reported period). By 2001, Americans were logging over 330 billion miles going
to and from the store. A conservative estimate puts the current figure at 365
billion miles, producing 154 million metric tons of CO2 annually.
Mitchell estimates that since WalMart accounts for 10 percent of all U.S.
retail sales, its share of the driving-caused emissions is 15.4 million metric
tons -- and likely more because the chain leads the way in auto-oriented store
formats and locations. And that figure is in addition to the 15.3 million
metric ton figure the company itself reports as the “carbon footprint” for its
U.S. stores and trucks’ power needs.
“By embracing WalMart,” Mitchell insists, “groups like NRDC and Environmental
Defense are not only absolving the company of the consequences of its business
model, but implying that this method of retailing goods can, with adjustments,
be made sustainable.”
NRDC’s Jon Coifman agrees this country’s current sprawling development form is
“extremely” detrimental environmentally, pushing oil consumption and carbon
emissions up significantly. But it’s “not a useful or viable option,” he
suggests, “to wish the big-box genie back into the bottle.” NRDC has never
issued a press release on the counsel that it is giving WalMart on technical CO2
issues. But it believes, says Coifman, that if the goal is lowering carbon
impact wherever possible, “you can’t not deal with the largest single business
enterprise on the planet.”
The dilemma the enviros face is that the big-box companies’ intend to keep on
sprawling out to new store locations. Despite some recent slowdown, WalMart
plans to keep expanding by a rate of several dozen super-stores a month. If its
goals are fulfilled, Mitchell estimates, the company by 2015 will have expanded
its domestic footprint by 20,000 more acres. The new land will largely consist
of CO2-absorbing fields and forests, turned by the construction of the stores
and their parking lots into generators of surface oil and other petrochemicals
that get swept into nearby lakes and streams during heavy rains.
The same amount of retail space, notes Mitchell, could be absorbed in an
existing city or town fabric for about a fifth of WalMart’s typical land
consumption. Auto trips would be shorter, many more errands done on foot or by
bike.
Which raises the question: how much new retailing do we need? The American
landscape is already littered with thousands of dead malls and vacant strip
shopping centers. As Jonathan Miller writes in PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ yearly
advisory to investors, “The most over-retailed country in the world hardly needs
more shopping outlets of any kind.”
When I caught up with Stacy Mitchell last week, she was in Augusta, Maine,
ecstatic about just-approved state legislation to slow down big-store expansion.
Before approving any store 75,000 square feet or larger, Maine towns will be
obliged to commission an independent economic study of the impact on jobs,
public services, and the community’s downtown, followed by a public hearing.
The pathbreaking Maine bill was pushed by the Institute for Local
Self-Reliance, with which Mitchell’s affiliated, helped by a coalition of 180
small business owners. Not surprisingly, it was opposed by the Maine Merchants
Assn. (including WalMart and Target) and Maine Chamber of Commerce.
So here’s the intriguing future issue: How will major environmental groups
choose sides as grassroots
