“We take waste reduction very seriously,” he said, “because at the end of the day that’s savings that we can pass into lower prices for our customers.”
Citing Walmart’s own customer surveys, MacNaughton said that Canadian consumers are perfectly willing to purchase environmentally-preferred products, such as Walmart’s own For the Greener Good product range, but not if it entails paying an extra price premium for them.
“So it is our shared burden to figure out, as a team, how to delight our customers,” MacNaughton said, “while at the same time helping to save the planet.”
Stressing that Walmart has implemented an exte
nsive range of capital-intensive environmental upgrades across many of its Canadian retail, distribution and supply-chain operations over the last year, MacNaughton strongly urged the Canadian CPG vendors to follow suit because the retailer is starting to approach the limits of what it can do for the environment strictly through its own internal efforts.
“The truth is that only eight per cent of Walmart’s environmental footprint comes from our own operations,” he pointed out, with the rest generated by all other activities related to its suppliers and customers.
“So no matter how big we are, how good we are, or how focused we are, we simply can’t do it alone because eight per cent of our environmental impact is all that we can affect directly,” MacNaughton stated, explaining the company’s growing emphasis on packaging reduction for all the products entering its stores.
“We won’t, and we can’t, do it alone,” asserted MacNaughton.
“We are very dependent on each other, specifically in the area of packaging, and our deadline for reducing our packaging by five per cent is coming up pretty quickly.
“I am challenging you to work together with us to provide more sustainable, more recyclable and more reusable packaging,” stated MacNaughton, echoing McGuffin’s observation that the current rate for Packaging
Scorecard metrics compliance among Canadian suppliers is simply nowhere near good enough.
“Of all the SKUs (stock-keeping) we currently sell in our stores, only 20 per cent are part of the Scorecard today,” he reiterated, “and I need you, our suppliers and packaging partners, to help us make it 100 per cent by July 1 of this year.
“And I am not going to be a nice guy about it,” he stressed. “We need you to do it because it is very important for our business model.”
Minimizing consumer packaging waste is also vitally important to the ultimate success of ambitious waste-diversion goals set out by the provincially-operated Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO) corporation, according to the provincial Minister of Environment John Gerretsen, who once again raised the prospect of imposing the highly controversial EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) levies on CPG brand-owners sooner rather than later—essentially requiring the industry to fund 100 per cent of the costs of administering the province’s Blue Box curbside recycling program, doubling its current 50-percent share of the burden.
“We have our own very aggressive waste diversion targets we want to achieve by 2013,” stated Gerretsen. “The people of Ontario are getting the sustainability message, and they want their government to move in the right direction.
“There is a new awareness of a shared stewardship of the environment, where everyone has to do their part to leave the legacy of clean air and pure water for our children … and the time has long passed for us to solve our problems simply by digging more and bigger holes in the ground to bury our waste.”
With Ontario residents generating an estimated one tonne of waste per person each year, “Having 13 million tonnes of waste to haul off to the landfills is simply too much,” he declared.
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