Retailer pushing its green concepts
Posted on Sunday, November 19, 2006
AURORA, Colo. — Wind turbines, rows of tall windows, a 200-foot-long dimpled-metal wall and shiny rooftop solar panels are just hints of what’s to come.
Next to a busy freeway in suburban Denver is tomorrow’s Wal-Mart, today. And it’s getting a lot of attention.
For the past year, this experimental Wal-Mart Supercenter has been testing ways to be more environmentally sensitive in everything it does.
What works here won’t stay in Aurora. The world’s largest retailer wants ideas it can use in all of its more than 6, 600 stores around the globe.
“The goal has never been to build demonstration stores,” said Andy Ruben, who heads the company’s environmental efforts. “The experimental stores are successful when the learnings get applied to all stores.” And the changes are likely to spread beyond Bentonvillebased Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
“It’s transformational,” said Charles Lockwood, an environmental real estate consultant in Los Angeles, whose article “Building the Green Way” appeared in June’s Harvard Business Review. “By their size, they’re forcing manufacturers to come up with more earth-friendly, energy-efficient products, which then become the industry norm.” Despite the company’s efforts, not every customer is aware of what Wal-Mart is doing.
“I know about the wind air thing out there because you can see it when you drive in, but not anything else,” said Lori Eastwood, a 48-year-old mother who drives 45 minutes once a month to shop at the Aurora store.
But if Wal-Mart has its way, that will change, too.
As the company’s environmentally conscious changes roll out to its other stores, Wal-Mart figures it has 130 million opportunities every week — each time a shopper walks through its doors — to encourage people to make money-saving, earth-friendly choices in their own homes and lives.
What’s more, the findings from Colorado and a predecessor experimental store in McKinney, Texas, offer strategies for burnishing Wal-Mart’s image and winning over skeptics.
“It cuts operating expense, and it can be a spectacular success with shoppers,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of retail consulting firm Strategic Resources Inc. “This can be the beachhead they use to rebuild consumer, community and political confidence.” Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts, unlike some of its other initiatives, also have won the company something more elusive: approval from critics and others not predisposed to Wal-Mart fandom.
A recent New York gala dinner hosted by movie producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein honored Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. for “his commitment to environmental sustainability.” Co-hosts included talkshow star Charlie Rose, NBC Universal CEO Bob Wright, MTV creator Robert Pittman and investment banker Steven Rattner.
The company’s folksy image has taken a beating the past 18 months, with critics lambasting Wal-Mart for its wage and benefit policies.
At the same time, the retailer’s once-mighty sales machine has faltered; the company last month posted nearly flat sales, its worst showing in six years.
Wal-Mart, which last year had sales of $ 312 billion, has said it will grow its way out of the slump in part by attracting more-affluent shoppers and expanding to new areas including Chicago and cities along the East and West coasts.
By turning to conservationism, which many urban and wealthier shoppers find attractive, Wal-Mart might have found a way to kill several birds with one environmentally friendly stone.
But Wal-Mart says that’s not why it’s going green. Above all, the retailer says, its earth-friendly initiatives will save the company and its customers money, which goes to the heart of the Wal-Mart business model.
Just inside the Aurora store’s entryways, giant walls herald “The Aurora Experiment.” Pamphlets offer maps and descriptions of the projects and lists of the renewable materials used to make flooring, fixtures, counters and benches.
A TV monitor offers realtime displays of energy used and saved in different tests throughout the store.
On a recent cloudy morning, on the store’s first anniversary, solar panels were generating 16. 7 kilowatts of power in the middle of the day. That’s roughly 10 percent of their capacity and enough to power four or five houses.
Not all the experiments are ready for export to other stores. Wind turbines have short-circuited. Wal-Mart is still monitoring the use of recycled cooking and motor oil in heating. And the wild-looking field of native prairie plantings, which require little water, is not an aesthetic all cities would appreciate.
But as the nation’s largest private purchaser of electricity, with an annual power bill of $ 1 billion, Wal-Mart says the successful experiments make the duds worthwhile.
In one test, Wal-Mart took items typically displayed in open cold cases — such as lunch meats, cheeses, biscuit dough and eggs — and put them in enclosed, freezerlike units, cutting that area’s energy bill 70 percent.
“Just like closing the door on the refrigerator at your house,” said Charles Zimmerman, Wal-Mart’s vice president of prototypes and new formats.
That experiment was worth exporting, Wal-Mart said. The enclosed refrigerators next will appear in six new “high-efficiency” stores that the company said would be a bridge between the lab stores and the chain’s future prototype.
Highly efficient lights for refrigerators and freezers did even better. The light-emittingdiode fixtures use 50 percent less energy than the traditional fluorescent lights, can be turned on and off and last four times as long as the current bulbs, about as long as the refrigerator cases themselves.
All new Wal-Mart stores will have freezer lights that shut off if no one’s nearby. That test came from engineers taking a large white motion detector intended for security lights and jury-rigging it onto a freezer unit in Aurora.
By dimming the lights when no customers were around, those freezers used only 37 percent as much energy as the ones that always had their lights on.
Even some of Wal-Mart’s most committed critics find it hard to criticize the company’s environmental efforts and even harder to find fault with the green stores.
“We’re encouraged by Wal-Mart’s new environmental initiatives because they could, if implemented, change the way American businesses approach environmental sustainability,” said Nu Wexler, of the unionbacked Wal-Mart Watch.
The first change is likely to come in the retail sector. Wal-Mart has given presentations and tours of its experiments to competitors such as Target Corp., Costco Wholesale Corp. and Food Lion in hopes of winning converts and driving prices down on the new technology, Zimmerman said.
Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, declined to work with Wal-Mart on environmental matters because the company wouldn’t agree also to talk about labor, health care and other issues.
Nonetheless, Pope said that after examining Wal-Mart’s initiatives, he was convinced the company was making a sincere and significant commitment, even if he was skeptical that some goals could be reached.
“None of this is ‘ greenstanding, ’” said Pope, who also serves on the board of union-backed Wal-Mart Watch, an organization that is trying to change the way Wal-Mart operates.
Here’s some of the other ideas being tested at Wal-Mart’s two green stores: Light-emitting diodes are used in exterior signs and in the store. Evaporative cooling installed in the Colorado store uses water sprayed into the air stream to cool the air as it evaporates. Since April, the Texas store has used 85 percent less water for irrigation thanks to the use of native, drought-tolerant plants in landscaping and drip irrigation. Waterless urinals were installed in the men’s restrooms. The urinals were designed to save 1 to 3 gallons of water per use. Pervious pavement and / or concrete were used at both stores to assist with draining water from the parking lots. This pavement allows water to percolate through the pavement system and into the groundwater system. Spoiled items from the produce, deli, meat and dairy departments are sent out for composting. The compost is then sold at Wal-Mart’s stores. Recycled pavement was used in some parking areas. Ternary concrete also was used. This material mixes traditional concrete with industrial byproducts including fly ash (results from burning coal for electricity ) and slag (a byproduct of steel manufacturing ).
Recycled rubber was used for some sidewalks, but they’re warping and fading in the sun at the Texas store. Countertops were made with recycled glass and concrete. Bamboo was made into woodwork and flooring. While the flooring is holding up well, the cabinets and fixtures are not.
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