The Green Room

Carbon counting time

By Greg Trimble on March 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Wind power at Sam’s Club in Palmdale, Calif.

It’s that time of year again.  With video conferencing technology, we’ve just met with our global peers and counterparts in Energy, Construction and Maintenance from all our markets around the world to kick off our annual greenhouse gas (GHG) data gathering process.

It seems 6:30 a.m. central standard time is just about the best time to hold a global meeting like this – although some of our folks in Africa, India, China, and Japan might not be in total agreement.  We’re coordinating with the representatives from all 27 of our market countries to gather the information necessary to compute our annual global corporate GHG footprint.

We’ll publish our carbon results next month in our Global Responsibility Report, which we will link to here in The Green Room.  The 2011 report is available here and is summed up here by Co.Exist.

To determine our carbon footprint, we gathered more than nine million bits of information this year.  We’ve done an exhaustive inventory of all our electricity, natural gas, diesel, propane and refrigerant use from around the world. The data will show that some markets are doing better than others at reducing their emissions and costs, and it is important to understand why.

Where utility costs are higher, it’s easier to make the business case to complete cost-effective efficiency and renewable projects.  But in places such as Brazil, where utilities already use a fuel mix that is largely renewable, it’s actually more difficult to lower your footprint through energy-efficiency projects. The financial returns are not as attractive, and you receive very little additional carbon reduction. Renewable energy projects are even more difficult to develop because of the same issues.

Some of our operations, such as Asda in the UK, have very robust programs for energy efficiency.  They’ve also made a significant investment in metering infrastructure and information services that allow them to see the granular level of data needed to understand the performance of equipment. That metering is not cheap, but there is a financial payback and our Asda division is leading the company in energy reductions.

Similarly, Walmart de Mexico has developed an innovative approach for shared savings and performance contracting that allows them to use the expertise of other companies to improve energy reduction. Their associates are also engaged daily to ensure consumption is kept as low as possible.

Mexico’s ability to help develop wind projects under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol has been a key factor in allowing them to become a leader in renewable wind energy consumption, surpassing even the very successful wind work done by our U.S. operations.

China has made all sales floor lighting LED.  They have also led the way in putting sliding doors on coffin-type refrigerated cases, keeping electricity use low and providing a more comfortable shopping experience.  Other Walmart markets are following suit with these doors.  Some are even starting to test installing doors on medium-temperature refrigerated cases.

The U.S. continues to aggressively install solar photovoltaic panels on our rooftops, and in a few cases, over our parking lots, helping to make them No. 2 among on-site green power generators and, along with our other markets, the No. 3 purchaser of green power among Fortune 500 companies.

Using the data to recognize what has made these markets leaders and leveraging their successes across our entire fleet of stores and clubs is one of the things that will allow us to keep our expenses low and pass savings on to our customers.  That’s our mission, and in economic times like these, it couldn’t be more important.