Falling more in love with Wal-Mart: On textiles and bamboo

Weird, huh? I just followed a tweet from sustainable marketing uber-maven Don Carli to find out more about the Wal-Mart sustainable textiles network. I can’t think of any other single organisation driving so fast to more sustainable business outcomes, and quite honestly, I would never have suspected Wal-Mart would be making the moves it is.

Wal-Mart pretty much is the global supply chain, and it has amazing power to improve sustainability. Could it be that Wal-Mart, for all its hard-charging business behaviour, is still basically a family-owned business? Watch the video – which clearly shows the entire cotton supply chain. Great teaching! Wal-Mart uses organic cotton – did you know that? “If you converted all our cotton to organic it would have massive benefits”. The company’s purchase of cotton was apparently the biggest purchase ever…

Why stop at cotton? Bet you didn’t know Wal-Mart is using bamboo in its socks now. Seriously- watch the video (shame its not embeddable). Its also recycling polyester.

So that t-shirt above. That is from Wal-Mart’s own brand clothes. When you read a Wal-Mart blog about purchasing and supply chain, the business is genuinely taking a direction. Unlike, say, Shell’s Climate Change policy blog, which appears to be a fig-leaf with little real links to corporate strategy, Wal-Mart is walking in the same direction it is talking. You can respect author David Hone, but Shell’s performance, not so much.

Wal-Mart, on the other hand, seems to realise that to be a successful company in the 21st century, it needs to want to be a successful business in the 22nd.

update: I was talking to someone in the back channel who sent this DM: “did you read Ruskoff’s Life Inc about how they devastate local economies and make everyone dependent on massive transport systems?”

I should say I am more than familiar with the case against Wal-Mart. But without efficiency and economies of scale we’re not going to be able to solve this century’s challenges. Carrot and stick, and all that. Retail is definitely part of the problem, but its also part of solution.