Wal-Mart has been harvesting kudos for its dramatic “green” promises. Even Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council have gone on record praising the massive retailer’s intentions to reduce electricity usage in its stores 20 percent by 2013 and to double the fuel economy of its trucks by 2015.
But author-activist Stacy Mitchell has tossed a firecracker into the Wal-Mart-environmentalist lovefest. In a Grist magazine article and subsequent interview, she acknowledges that Wal-Mart’s commitments are no mere “greenwashing” – that they will in fact save substantial electricity, oil and carbon impact.
But the green moves miss the mega-point, insists Mitchell, author of the recent book “Big-Box Swindle.” Wal-Mart along with such chains as Target and Home Depot divert customers from close-in neighborhood or town shopping to the outer fringes of metro areas.
In fact, the big retail boxes have displaced tens of thousands of neighborhood and downtown businesses and focused the necessities of life into huge stores that draw car-borne shoppers from large areas.
Longer and longer drives are necessary to buy milk or bread, pick up a container of paint or a lawnmower part.
A principal result: shopping-related driving grew by a stunning 40 percent, three times as fast as driving for any other purpose, from 1990 to 2001 (the last reported period). By 2001, Americans were logging more than 330 billion miles going to and from stores. A conservative estimate puts the current figure at 365 billion miles, producing 154 million metric tons of CO2 annually.
Mitchell estimates that since Wal-Mart accounts for 10 percent of all U.S. retail sales, its share of the driving-caused emissions is 15.4 million metric tons – and likely more because the chain leads the way in auto-oriented store formats and locations. And that figure is in addition to the 15.3 million metric ton figure the company itself reports as the “carbon footprint” for its U.S. stores and trucks’ power needs.
“By embracing Wal-Mart,” Mitchell insists, “groups like NRDC and Environmental Defense are not only absolving the company of the consequences of its business model, but implying that this method of retailing goods can, with adjustments, be made sustainable.” NRDC’s Jon Coifman agrees this country’s current sprawling development form is “extremely” detrimental environmentally, pushing oil consumption and carbon emissions up significantly. But it’s “not a useful or viable option,” he suggests, “to wish the big-box genie back into the bottle.” NRDC has never issued a press release on the counsel that it is giving Wal-Mart on technical CO2 issues. But it believes, says Coifman, that if the goal is lowering carbon impact wherever possible, “you can’t not deal with the largest single business enterprise on the planet.” The dilemma the enviros face is that the big-box companies intend to keep on sprawling out to new store locations. Despite some recent slowdowns, Wal-Mart plans to keep expanding by a rate of several dozen super-stores a month. If its goals of are fulfilled, Mitchell estimates, the company by 2015 will have expanded its domestic footprint by 20,000 more acres. The new land will largely consist of CO2-absorbing fields and forests, turned by the construction of the stores and their parking lots into generators of surface oil and other petrochemicals that get swept into nearby lakes and streams during heavy rains.
The same amount of retail space, notes Mitchell, could be absorbed in an existing city or town fabric for about a fifth of Wal-Mart’s typical land consumption. Auto trips would be shorter, many more errands done on foot or by bike.
Which raises the question: How much new retailing do we need? The American landscape is already littered with thousands of dead malls and vacant strip shopping centers. As Jonathan Miller writes in PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ yearly advisory to investors, “The most over-retailed country in the world hardly needs more shopping outlets of any kind.” When I caught up with Stacy Mitchell last week, she was in Augusta, Maine, ecstatic about just-approved state legislation to slow down big-store expansion. Before approving any store 75,000 square feet or larger, Maine towns will be obliged to commission an independent economic study of the impact on jobs, public services, and of the community’s downtown, followed by a public hearing.
The pathbreaking Maine bill was pushed by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, with which Mitchell is affiliated, helped by a coalition of 180 small business owners but opposed by the Maine Merchants Assn. (including Wal-Mart and Target) and Maine Chamber of Commerce.
The intriguing future issue: How will major environmental groups choose sides as grassroots constituencies mobilize state by state to actually halt the march of Wal-Mart and its sister big boxes across the American landscape? Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
(c) 2007, The Washington Post Writers Group
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