Wal-Mart announced today the launching of an eco-labelling program that will allow customers to see the environmental footprint of the products they wish to buy. In collaboration with a consortium of universities, the giant retailer will work on issuing an index that will reflect the life cycles of its products.
The news seems to have been perceived as positive among the media and the public.
Photo by code poet. Some rights reserved (Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.)
“Wal-Mart had been the company that the left loved to hate, because it seemed to have too much power and to use it in non socially constructive ways, squeezing suppliers or keeping wages down,” wrote Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Bloomberg.com. “Today Wal-Mart reminds us that a new kind of capitalism is possible in which big companies can use their power constructively, for the good of society and to move on issues that are still largely unaddressed by government.”
Am I the only one to be skeptical? It’s not because Wal-Mart goes green that it should be hailed as a model for a new capitalism. In my opinion, Wal-Mart is still hurting local economies as well as the urban fabric, and the eco-labelling program will not necessarily improve the food industry’s ethics. Even if we know that the food industry has some serious issues to address, we seem to keep our focus on the environmental side. The organic and local movements are so strong right now that it sometimes seems that it’s all that matters. In fact, going organic or making sure that the food was produced in an environmentally-friendly way might not be enough to improve the global food situation.
“Even if you stick an organic label on Walmart, the system remains the same,” wrote Dorothy Woodend in a review of the documentary Food Inc. in The Tyee. ” The same distribution chains, the same scale of practice, the same billions upon billions of Stonyfield plastic yogurt containers shipped around the country, all so that people can buy more shit with a clean conscience.”
When will we be ready to truly change our habits instead of reading a label for a second?
One Comment
I agree that the problem with Wal-Mart is its labour practices more than anything, as well as its Starbucks-like winner-take-all mentality. What I do find interesting is the fact that this is a step in A right direction, if not THE right direction; it’s true that there can be a new type of capitalism that takes into consideration social as well as financial return.