Wal-Mart’s Eco-Labels: the New Face of Capitalism, or Just Lipstick on a Pig?

As Wal-Mart unveiled plans to enforce mandatory ‘eco-labels’ on all of its products this week, a cloud of confusion has come over many environmental groups. How can the world’s largest and most aggressively expansive retailer—whose rise to global dominance has been dependent on, and partly responsible for, increased suburban sprawl, more freeways, and the gas-guzzling, ‘big-box,’ business model—position itself at the forefront of sustainable consumerism?

While many praised Wal-Mart’s announcement as a promising advance towards constructive capitalism – “one small move for Wal-Mart and one giant leap for Planet Earth”—other, somewhat instinctual Wal-Mart skeptics have dismissed the mega-retailer’s sudden interest in the green movement as a facile bid for customers. For years, Wal-Mart has been struggling to court younger, more socially conscious shoppers—those born after around 1980, who will need to forget decades of raucous protests against the company’s labor policies, tacky merchandise and reliance on overseas manufacturers to take Wal-Mart seriously. As the recession has forced many formerly affluent consumers to hunt for bargains, Wal-Mart has been under even greater pressure to quickly transform its public image into a more cosmopolitan and benign establishment—as a place where those priced out of IKEA and Whole Foods won’t be ashamed to show their faces. In the hopes of continuing to attract and retain this sort of customer, the once adamantly anti-Obama establishment has now publicly endorsed healthcare reform and business sustainability; a dramatic and promising change, yet, some suggest, more a clever PR stunt and political gambit than a legitimate shift in the company’s priorities.

There is also concern over the true effectiveness of the labeling system. While Wal-Mart itself will not be directly in charge of the ‘Green Index’ being designed to gauge a product’s environmental and social impact (this will be done by an assemblage of researchers at the Sustainability Consortium), there is debate as to whether the information on ‘green-tags’ isn’t inherently deceptive. For instance, though Wal-Mart and its competitors may eventually sell products that are more environmentally and socially innocuous, the labeling system fails to address the overall emissions rates of the companies themselves; many of whom continue, as global-transport-dependent, transnational corporations, to host soaring emissions rates as they expand rapidly across the globe.

As Miguel Bustillo of the “Wall Street Journal” writes, Wal-Mart’s foray into the green movement is best seen as an “experiment” to see if people will actually shell out more for “environmentally superior products” in the same way some of us pay extra for healthier food. Currently, and with good reason, Wal-Mart does not believe that the presence of eco-labels will yield immediate, widespread effects on consumer behavior (this is, after all, the same generation that witnessed the federal institution of the Nutrition Facts Label in 1990 but has since experienced an unprecedented spike in obesity rates). Like food, those who care—and can—will opt to pay more for green goods (as many already do), while those who either lack the means or proclivity will likely ignore the labels and stick to their traditional shopping habits. As Wal-Mart executives have hinted in conversations with the “New York Times,” and not without a certain detached bemusement, the eco-label is mainly intended to initiate an industry-wide adaptation to the still-crystallizing consumer habits of the next generation, whose apparent prioritization of “sustainability” over price and “what happens in the economy” makes them more likely—particularly if habituated while still young—to consistently spend more on items with comforting environmental ratings than their parents ever would.

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Vicki Nikolaidis on July 24, 2009, 2:17 PM

I can’t for even 1 second believe Wal Mart has suddenly become eco-friendly. This is the store that from the beginning advertised all their products as ‘made in the U.S.A.’ So you walk in the store and find the products (right under the sign that says ‘made in the U.S.A’) . . . were made in China.

Wal Mart isn’t the only culprit pretending to be eco friendly by only attaching labels that say as much on their products. Check where the product was made, for that matter, I wonder where the label was made?