Walmart Sustainability Strategy Case - Research Paper

As company impacts growing in a restricted system, social and environmental problems are becoming business problem. Especially true for a company of Wal-Mart's scale. As one of the world's largest retailers, Wal-Mart has to make sure that many types of products, supply constraints are conducted in an environmentally friendly manner in order to deliver to customers.

Wal-Mart has always played a role as pioneer, going against conservative wisdom in the business industry. It has always willing to expand its horizon outside the box, such as anticipating business opportunities and executing effective strategies. As Elm states, "Your overall objective is to derive economic benefits from improved environmental and social outcomes. It's not philanthropy". This indicates that as working on sustainability projects can help boost careers within Wal-Mart. Therefore, over the past year, Wal-Mart has executed an aggressive sustainability strategy. It has established many sub-goals to sustain value networks in renewable energy and sustainable products. Examples include:

1. At the very beginning, Wal-Mart has encouraged its suppliers to deliver environmental-friendly products in a recyclable packaging.

2. Wal-Mart as one of the biggest private electricity users in the Unites States and after it received a rough results from the UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists), it starts to set goals for reducing its impact on the environment. Such as:

a. Reduce greenhouse gas emissions form existing retailers.

b. Give preference to suppliers who can significantly reduce gas emissions and solid waste

c. Aggressively pursue policies, which could foster overall energy efficiency

3. Promotes products with "green" shelf tags to consumers.

4. It aims to achieve a short-term goal for doubling the transportation fleet efficiency within ten years, to a 25% improvement in fuel efficiency. This could help save up to 75 million dollars annually.

5. It launched a program to help China preventing from an environmental crisis that could affect the suppliers.

6. In order to proper manager the PVC products content, Wal-Mart given the permission for eliminating the PVC packaging from private label brands

7. Between 2008 and 2013, the scorecard established by War-mart helps it reducing the packaging used by its suppliers and also increase recycled content.