Wal-Mart Tracks Green Product Adoption
As retailer to over 90% of US households, Wal-Mart is in the unique position of being an excellent compiler of information.
Recently they started tracking shoppers’ green buying habits. Actually all retailers track products their consumers purchase for inventory control. Wal-Mart however was one of the leaders in using this data to tightly control inventory and share information with manufacturers. They retain leadership in this area with RFID tracking systems and well managed JIT manufacturing cooperative programs with their vendors.
Now Wal-Mart is sharing some of this information with the world with the Wal-Mart Live-Better Index .
In April 2007, Wal-Mart selected 5 products to follow to assess the increase in adoption green products: Fluorescent light bulbs, organic milk, Concentrated/reduced-packaging liquid laundry detergents, extended-life paper products and organic baby food. A year later sales of these items had increased by 66%.
The Environmental Leader reports:
As a whole, Wal-Mart says that adoption rates of the five sustainable Live Better products have increased significantly over the past year:
1. Compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs - Average adoption rate of 19.7 percent (up from 13.39% in 2007)
* Delaware leads the category with an adoption rate of 25.8 percent2. Organic baby food and formula - Average adoption rate of 4.12 percent (down from 4.31% in 2007)
* California continues to lead the category with an 8.58 percent adoption rate3. Organic milk - Average adoption rate of 1.58 percent (up from 1.15% in 2007)
* Virginia has the highest adoption rate of organic milk at 2.7 percent4. Extended life paper products - Average adoption rate of 67.5 percent (up from 50.77% in 2007)
* Minnesota has the highest adoption rate with 78.1 percent5. Concentrated/reduced-packaging liquid laundry detergents - Average adoption rate of 76.3 percent (up from 22.86% in 2007)
* Oklahoma leads the category with an adoption rate of 96.3 percent
For eco-entrepreneurs this is valuable information. As Wal-Mart adds more categories and tracks how a declining economy affects sales of sustainability products, green entrepreneurs have yet a another source of information for effectively managing their own inventory and production plans.
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As someone who sells light bulbs for a living, I am less enthusiastic than most about compact fluorescent bulbs. This is due to the fact that the ones currently available contain significant amounts of mercury. If one of these bulbs should break inside of a person’s home, it could cause a challenging disposal situation. It is my belief that the technology should progress to a point at which the mercury levels are low or nonexistent before people changeover their entire homes. Another consideration is that as these bulbs burn out, they will most likely be thrown away as though they are normal rubbish and landfills will have incredibly high levels of mercury in their soil as a result.
Most CFLs today on the market contain less than 5mgs of mercury and there are CFL options out there that contain as little as 1.5mgs of mercury- which can hardly be called a “significant amounts of mercury” considering that many item in your home contain 100s of times more of mercury including your computer. Mercury levels in CFLs can never be “nonexistent” since mercury is a necessary component of a CFL and there is no other known element that is capable of replacing it. But CFLs actually prevent more mercury from entering the environment. According to the Union of Concerned Scientist, “a coal-fired power plant will emit about four times more mercury to keep an incandescent bulb glowing, compared with a CFL of the same light output”.