A year ago we shared this post on Walmart and their Sustainability Index and Sustainability Consortium. Back in August 2009 when we first talked about Walmart’s initiative on HomeIntel, we gave them credit for the idea but we were interested to see how things would turn out, and we aren’t the only ones. Recently sustainability news sources are starting to talk about the year anniversary of Walmart’s announcement and today we’re taking a look at the reactions.
The overall goal of the brand’s Sustainability Index is to create a “simple tool for customers” to rate the sustainability level of a product. In addition to implementing other sustainably focused practices, Walmart devised a three-step program to develop the Index. The steps include surveying suppliers, creating a consortium of universities and finally developing the actual index for consumer use. While these three steps make the program sound like a simple, easily-attainable goal, the development process is anything. Like anything else with the green movement, patience is key and this is a lesson that Walmart is learning along the way.
While the overall progress of the program and completion of the steps is moving at a slow pace and things are proving more challenging for the brand than first assessed, we’d like to take a look at the success of the movement in bringing the idea of measuring sustainability to the masses.
The sustainability movement and lifestyle has seen a lot of growth in the past year, and as it continues to develop into an even more mainstream idea, buy in from leading brands like Walmart helps communicate the ideas to further educate the masses. A simple and clear sustainability index for consumers to judge the level of green of a certain brand is a great tool for shoppers, but perhaps the fact that Walmart has helped put the sustainable manufacturing process in the spotlight to get consumers thinking about it is valuable in itself.
We’re interested to see how the Sustainability Index continues to develop and how it compares to other measurement tools like LCA, but at this point we can only give credit to Walmart for taking on this huge task and helping to push the topic into the minds of mainstream consumers.














