Walmart’s Jeff Rice Discusses Sustainability and Incentivizing Shift

We came across a recently released and insightful talk given by Walmart’s Director of Sustainability, Jeff Rice.  In his presentation he covered how Walmart has been so successful in their sustainability programs and where they are headed in the not-so-distant future.

Rice discussed that in order to be successful in sustainability you have to take “going green” seriously. In other words, without persistence and dedication your sustainability program will only fizzle out. With a customer base of nearly 200,000,000 individuals making purchases a week, Walmart had the opportunity to make widespread eco-effects. Rice made sure this opportunity was not passed up. Walmart has since been successful in integrating sustainability not only into its practices, but into its products as well.

Three major lessons that Rice has learned along the way included first and foremost, “measuring what matters.” This means finding out what metrics to use when assessing sustainability. Then Rice emphasized integrating sustainability into every aspect of the company’s practices. Lastly Rice iterated how incentives can unlock actions, but only through focused improvement and commitment from the whole team.

Check out some other great points that Jeff Rice had to make in the complete video below:

Infographic: Where Will Climate Change Hurt You the Most?

We love a good infographic -- and we recently came across this great visualization on climate change vulnerability. Vulnerability is grouped into four categories: health impacts, weather disasters, habitat loss, and economic stress. Circles on the left side of each set indicate relative magnitude of vulnerability in 2010, circles on the right indicate the same for 2030. Click on the image to view a larger version:

While the data is pretty interesting on its own, it can also be a valuable tool to assist companies with supply chain risk assessment -- particularly if you are a Walmart supplier responding to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Report questionnaire. Identifying the types of vulnerability in the geographies where you source raw materials (or contract manufacturing) can make it easier to pinpoint what kind of issues you may be facing in the future.

Source: DARA, a Madrid-based humanitarian advocacy organization, recently partnered with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, comprising countries particularly vulnerable to climate change, to create Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2010, an atlas of vulnerability. This infographic presents a small portion of the picture the Climate Vulnerability Monitor paints. 

RESOURCES: Understanding the Walmart Scorecard Webinar Slides Now Available

Looking for a copy of the “Understanding the Walmart Scorecard” Webinar slides presented by Jennifer Woofter this past October? 

If you were able to join us for this free webinar, we hope that you found the presentation useful and that it helped to kick start some brainstorming around next steps to confidently assess how you would score on the Walmart scorecard, as well as some of the top ways to improve.  (A special thank you goes out to Industry Intelligence for hosting as well!)  If not, no worries, we are happy to share the slides that our now available in our resources section.  Using these slides, Jennifer shared her insight into how Walmart is using sustainability to drive supplier performance.  Jennifer explored commonly asked questions, including:

• What are Walmart's sustainability expectations for suppliers?
• What specific environmental and social elements must suppliers have in place to score well?
• What are the easiest ways to improve your score?
• What does the future hold for the Walmart Supplier Sustainability Scorecard?

You might also want to join our mailing list so you don’t miss out on our future webinars!  You may have already seen in our past blog entry that our next free webinar on Managing and Reporting Sustainability Metrics is today at 2:00 PM ET.  To register, visit Industry Intelligence’s event information page.

Careers in sustainability today mean staying abreast of new changes, expectations from clients, and how to continue to create a clear path and direction to guide your clients or your organization.  Although we focus primarily on the Walmart scorecard in these slides, it’s important to keep in mind trends such as these in order to successfully navigate them as similar approaches continue to develop.  How do you see similar scorecards in the industry today?  Are your clients or organization under more pressure to measure sustainability now than a few years ago?  How so?  Are there enough resources to navigate these developments or too many opinions and differing standards that it’s overwhelming? 

One of the key wrap-up points during the scorecard webinar was to start leveraging the many resources out there to help: from choosing sustainability software, to sustainability reports, to life cycle analysis, to hiring a sustainability consultant.  Don’t forget, we have a wealth of resources on our website to get you started and our “library” is constantly growing!