Wal-Mart helps the hungry, America’s hang up on drying jeans and greener beans from M&S
Wal-Mart beefs up hunger relief
While the height of the recession might be over, thousands of Americans are still feeling its impact in the pit of their stomachs, literally. According to a November 2009 US Department of Agriculture report, 15% of American households go without a steady food supply.
In response, Wal-Mart is ramping up its donations to American food banks, nearly doubling its annual giving to $2bn through its Fighting Hunger initiative.
Over the next five years, Wal-Mart will dole out $250m through grants to support hunger-relief, and donate over 500m kilograms of food from its stores. Wal-Mart employees are also stepping in and helping food banks organise and put the plan into action. In total, the company estimates these efforts will generate approximately one billion meals.
“Increasingly, we see opportunities to use our scale and reach to solve challenges in our communities,” says Wal-Mart vice-chairman Eduardo Castro-Wright. “This is one of those times.” The mega retailer began supporting the fight against hunger in 2005, distributing nearly 4.5m kg of food to national food banks.
At-cost cancer drugs
UK supermarket chain Asda, owned by Wal-Mart, has taken a big step in the sometimes not-so-generous world of pharmaceuticals, ending retail price mark-ups on privately prescribed cancer drugs. This will have remarkable financial repercussions for patients who have been paying thousands for cancer treatments deemed too expensive for the state-funded National Health Service to cover.
According to Asda, it found a mark-up of up to 76% on seven of the most common privately prescribed cancer drugs sold in UK pharmacies. But with this policy change, Asda will now sell the lung cancer drug Iressa for £2,167. This is in stark contrast to the £3,253 price tag for the same drug sold at Superdrug, and £3,251 at Boots. Asda will also sell several other drugs at cost for leukaemia, kidney and liver cancer, pancreatic and lung cancer, and stomach tumours.
The company called on the rest of the industry to follow its lead, and some are listening. Since Asda’s announcement, Sainsbury’s and Tesco have jumped on the bandwagon and are matching Asda’s pricing on the Iressa drug.
Dell gets certified compostable
We all know how cumbersome computer packaging can be. All those big, bulky boxes and Styrofoam pieces, which generate a mass of unnecessary waste. But Dell, the multinational IT company, is looking to make a change.
As part of the company’s larger commitment to overhaul computer packaging, Dell started developing alternative, more environmentally savvy packing materials. Of note is the company’s new bamboo packaging, used to cushion their smaller products such as notebooks, tablets and laptops. In fact, their bamboo packaging was just certified as compostable by the American Society for Testing and Materials.
This certification confirms that the packaging, made from mechanically pulped bamboo taken from a Forest Stewardship Council certified forest in China, will biodegrade when added to an active compost pile. It also certifies that the resulting compost can support plant life.
“This initiative has been a great reminder that it’s worth going the extra mile to ensure a sustainable solution truly is sustainable,” says Oliver Campbell, senior manager of Dell Packaging Worldwide. “My experience walking the supply chain, from chopping down a bamboo stalk to seeing the packaging moulded in the factory, gives me huge confidence in the strategy we’ve put in place for our customers.”
Levi’s vs your dryer
You may not wash your jeans every day – or even every week (and that’s a different story entirely). But, according to a Levi Strauss third party life-cycle assessment of its classic 501 jeans, nearly 60% of its environmental impact occurs in the hands of the consumer.
What it comes down to is that 80% of a single pair of jeans’ climate impact is a result of how we dry them: ie in the dryer. While dryers may not be ubiquitous in Europe, the average US household is a huge fan.
In an attempt to change that perspective and help bring the company’s carbon footprint down to zero, Levi, in partnership with the Myoo Create community, launched an open competition challenging the public to design an innovative, sustainable and attractive air-drying alternative. As an incentive, they’re offering a total of $10,000 to the top innovators.
The designs will be judged based on their aesthetics, ingenuity, scalability, and environmental sustainability. Five finalists will be selected: two by the judging panel and three based on Myoo user votes.
All five finalists will receive $500. The winner receives $4,500, second place gets $1,500, the public favourite (based on Myoo user votes) will receive $1,000, and the “most valuable Myoo community member” gets $500. The lucky winners will be announced on August 16.
“We’re doing our part to reduce impacts in the areas we do control, but we also need to influence consumers and the rest of the industry if we truly want to restore the environment,” says Michael Kobori, vice-president of social and environmental sustainability at Levi Strauss. “This initiative allows us to empower their creativity and find solutions together.”
Since the company’s jean life cycle assessment in 2009, Levi’s has devoted greater attention to educating consumers about their own environmental impact. In late 2009, the company launched the Caretag for Our Planet initiative, adding care instructions to their jeans, which encourage consumers to wash them in cold water, line dry and donate when no longer needed.
These programmes parlay into Levi’s overarching “3Cs” sustainability initiative: by 2012, the company aims to reduce packaging volume, or the “cube” box by 10%; increase the amount of recycled “content” in packaging by 40%; and increase the percentage of materials in packaging that are “kerbside” recyclable to 75%. These reductions would save an estimated $8m plus 9m kg of packaging. (And for more on Levi’s supply chain challenges, see this month’s special briefing from p11.)
M&S sells free trade veg
In a big move for Fairtrade, Marks & Spencer will be the first UK food retailer to boast sales of Fairtrade-certified vegetables. Last month the company started selling Fairtrade Kenyan green beans, but the variety of veg offerings will steadily increase in M&S and other food retailers nationwide.
The recent appearance of Fairtrade-certified vegetables is a result of new standards that were two years in the making. These standards now include small-scale farmers, who can only access export markets by selling their crops through larger and better-connected Fairtrade-certified farms.
“This product first will help small scale farmers, who are currently selling directly to a plantation, to make the leap to selling in their own right under Fairtrade terms, and become organised producer organisations,” says Harriet Lamb, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation. She says that farmers, their families and communities will directly benefit in the long term from the “Fairtrade premium” to invest in community development projects.
The Kenyan farmers will choose for themselves how to invest the premium. There are plans to build a local primary school and to develop additional water conservation projects, such as improved irrigation schemes to reduce waste.
Platinum gets responsible
The Responsible Jewellery Council recently added to its certification scheme the platinum group of metals.
RJC, which includes 230 member companies, was the first institution in the world to develop a certification system across the entire value chain – in this case, from mine to store. Member companies are required to get audited by an accredited, third party to ensure they are adhering to the RJC’s code of practice.
Having successfully developed a certification scheme for the production of diamonds and gold to be sold in jewellery, RJC felt it was the right time to expand its scope to include the platinum metals.
Members have also voted to empower the RJC board to determine at what point other precious materials should be included in the RJC scope, to help avoid the additional administrative costs associated with changing the council’s memorandum every time its scope was expanded.
With the recent addition of platinum, RJC is looking to bolster its membership by recruiting platinum miners and refiners, as well as their respective trade associations, as new RJC members.
“The addition of platinum group metals to the RJC system is proof of the confidence RJC members have that the certification system initially developed for diamonds and gold is suitably robust and sophisticated that its scope can be expanded to include other precious jewellery materials,” says Michael Rae, RCJ’s chief executive.
Lush joins the tar sands battle
Employees of soap and cosmetics retailer Lush stripped off in a sign of solidarity for the Rainforest Action Network’s (RAN) campaign to fight US support for the Canadian tar sands project.
The Canadian tar sands sit at the foothills of the Rocky mountains, in the Canadian boreal forest. Deep beneath the surface lies roughly 2tn barrels of oil, but extracting the oil will necessitate destroying a huge expanse of land (roughly the size of the US state of Florida). Such an extraction would produce three times the greenhouse gas emissions of conventionally produced oil because of the energy required to extract and process tar sands oil. This would also pose significant health ramifications for the surrounding communities.
The Lush/RAN campaign aims to raise awareness and encourage the American public to sign a petition directed at the US president, Barack Obama, asking him to end government support for the project. The two groups are petitioning Obama to redirect the $70-100bn intended for the tar sands project to research and development of sustainable energy alternatives, including hybrids and solar and wind energy.
Lush’s 103 US stores were equipped with T-shirts, flyers, petitions and eye-catching window displays of deforestation and open pit mining to spread the word about the project. Additionally, Lush is selling a limited edition bath soap, all profits from which will support the campaign.