Walmart to Reduce 1 Billion Metric Tons of emissions from Global Supply Chains

Hi All!

I'm Sreelakshmi M N, second year MBA student at Amrita School of Business Coimbatore. Recently I came across an article that discussed about how Walmart is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by redesigning their supply chain operation.

As Walmart aims at being the world's largest retailer to achieve its emission goal by 2030, it has cut down around 30 million metric tons of greenhouse gases out of its supply chain during the past three years.

Walmart says that, it is thinking more systematically about the negative effect emissions are creating on people and planet, so it aims at reducing its cumulative carbon footprint by a billion tons by the end of the decade.

In order to achieve this goal Walmart should rethink their operations as about 95 % of their emissions is from its supply chain.

Walmart which has about 12,000 stores worldwide releases 18 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2018 from its own operations and it is known as scope 1 and 2 emissions. While the emissions from suppliers was called scope 3, which was the majority of greenhouse pollutant in the whole supply chain.

Supplier Pressure

Walmart is putting pressure on suppliers to use more clean energy and to shift towards environmentally friendly product design and packaging.

 Currently 29% of Walmart’s electricity now comes from renewable sources and it is now trying to make it 35%. By 2030 it want to reach 100%.

 The company is looking at more reusable and refillable packaging models to reduce waste.

Less Waste

The company is searching for ways where free packaging can be removed, such as trash cans it sells that were once enclosed in cardboard boxes and can now be banded together. Walmart said its reusable bag sales rose globally by 42 per cent

The company reported incremental progress in hiring and promoting women and people of color, but the overall statistics mostly held around the same levels as in previous years.

Going forward, Walmart said it would break down the way minority employees are assessed so it can focus more clearly on charting Black employee career paths, and the company said it would aim to disclose its diversity data twice a year.