Wal-Mart: An Environmental Issue

When talking about important environmental issues in the world today, it is necessary to factor in the human element in every step of the equation. With the human factor comes the obvious business side of the formula. Considering the majority, if not all, of the pollution and environmental problems in the world stem from some aspect of the business world, I decided to take a look at one of the largest companies in the world and their impact on the environment.

Wal-Mart, being the largest retailer in the world, has made its own environmental tracks throughout the world. In 2004, Wal-Mart agreed to pay $400,000 to the government to settle claims that Sam's Club had flouted federal air pollution regulations in eleven states. That same year, the company also faced fines for violations of environmental laws in nine states. Georgia issued over $170,000 in penalties, among the highest paid in the state for violations of the Clean Water Act, to two Wal-Mart stores for knowingly letting polluted storm water run into state waters. These are just a few of the examples of how Wal-Mart has proven the impact that businesses can have on the environment.

With the critics demanding Wal-Mart change the way the company treats the environment, Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart, outlined where the company could decrease the environmental footprint. So far, they have concentrated on things such as more fuel efficient trucks and less packaging for the products in their stores. There are other problems that need attention from a corporation as large and powerful as Wal-Mart.

A major issue being addressed by environmental activists right now is the amount of CO2 that is being released into the air due to big-box shopping centers such as Wal-Mart. These CO2 emissions are being raised a couple different ways, one directly affected and caused by Wal-Mart. The expansion the company plans for the future, which is the direct cause from Wal-Mart, and the increase in the amount of miles being driven by American shoppers everyday, are major concerns for environmentalists.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the number of miles driven by American households drove each year for shopping, has increased forty percent from 1990 through 2001. This fact mirrors the massive increase in big-box shopping centers in America for the same time period. The problem is not that Americans are driving to the store more often, but rather the locations of these 'supercenters' and the lack of local grocery stores closer to home.

Since Wal-Mart's goal is to service as many small towns as possible, they choose locations that are just outside of small towns. The theory behind this location scouting is that more consumers can drive to the Wal-Mart from the surrounding towns. As a business plan, this seems like a fairly solid idea, but from an environment standpoint, this has caused more problems than at first anticipated. The middle locations of these stores are causing American consumers, who are already battling an oil addiction, to drive further for their shopping needs.

Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, points out that Americans are driving more than 365 billion miles each year going to and from the store, which equals to 154 million metric tons of CO2 being produced each year. Wal-Mart accounts for ten percent of U.S. retail sales themselves, this would make their share of these CO2 emissions about 15.4 million metric tons. Even if there is a major improvement in the fuel efficiency standards in vehicles, it would soon be eclipsed by the sheer number of miles people are driving just for their shopping. Stacy Mitchell also points to other problems than just all of this driving. Thousands upon thousands of acres of land have been cleared and paved to make room for big-box parking lots, which can deliver large doses of oil and other petrochemicals left behind by vehicles to nearby lakes and streams during rainstorms.

Aside from all this CO2 being pumped into the air from driving, there are the stores themselves. By making their current stores twenty percent more efficient, Wal-Mart will cut CO2 emissions by 2.5 million metric tons by 2013, according to Lee Scott. New stores built this year alone, will add more than 1 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere through their electricity consumption. Add that up year after year, and the efficiency of their stores seem to be diminished by their total environmental footprint.

These new stores are also taking up more land than needed, and are highly inefficient uses of space. 200,000 square feet of retail space, spread between several two-story, downtown building that share parking space takes up four acres of land. A single-story Wal-Mart Supercenter, with the same retail space and its standard 1,000 parking spaces, eats up twenty acres of land.

When a Wal-Mart closes, usually to move to a bigger location and become a Supercenter, the land it previously occupied sits unused. At any given time, over 300 closed Wal-Marts lie vacant in America. Most big-box retailers put certain rules on their unused land to cut back on competition, which means another big-box retailer can't come in and use that space. It is hard to find other retailers that can use upwards of 200,000 square feet of store space. There are also the Wal-Mart stores that are built as anchor stores in strip malls. When the company closes one of these anchor stores, the rest of the stores in the mall suffer, with many of them going out of business. This leaves even more than just the store space empty.

The reasoning I choose Wal-Mart as a major environmental issue, besides their blatant disregard for the environment, is the fact that America doesn't even need these big-box stores. Between 1990 and 2005, the amount of store space per capita in this country doubled, while consumer spending grew at less than half that rate. This is an unacceptable path, and will not help maintain a sustainable way of life on the planet. If Wal-Mart, due to its large size, could change these, and other, environmental issues they have been causing, it would have an immense impact on the environment. The other advantage to these facts being changed by Wal-Mart is that they are a business leader, so what they do is followed by other stores. The domino effect that would be caused is just unimaginable, and it would be done starting with just a little time and money from the richest and most powerful retailer in America.