BENTONVILLE, Ark.—Wal-Mart announced plans to develop a worldwide sustainable product index that will establish a single source of data for evaluating the sustainability of products. The company hopes other retailers will also adopt the index.
“Customers want products that are more efficient, that last longer and perform better,” said Mike Duke, Wal-Mart’s president and CEO. “And increasingly, they want information about the entire lifecycle of a product so they can feel good about buying it. They want to know that the materials in the product are safe, that it was made well and that it was produced in a responsible way.”
The company will introduce the initiative in three phases, beginning with a survey of its more than 100,000 suppliers around the world. The survey includes 15 questions that will serve as a tool for Wal-Mart’s suppliers to evaluate their own sustainability efforts. The questions will focus on four areas: energy and climate; material efficiency; natural resources, and people and community.
As a second step, the company is helping create a consortium of universities that will collaborate with suppliers, retailers, NGOs and government to develop a global database of information on the lifecycle of products.
“It is not our goal to create or own this index,” said Duke. “We want to spur the development of a common database that will allow the consortium to collect and analyze the knowledge of the global supply chain. We think this shared database will generate opportunities to be more innovative and to improve the sustainability of products and processes.”