Beacon Broadside

Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the New Rules Project, a
program of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and author
of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for
America’s Independent Businesses.  To subscribe to her monthly email
newsletter, click here.

Immersed as we are these days in discussions of carbon emissions and carbon offsets, food miles and feedback loops, Earth Day has come to feel more and more outmoded, a throwback to an earlier era before melting ice caps and the prospect of the end of life as we know it made the environment no longer a periodic concern but an everyday worry.

Earth Day is no longer ours anyway. That became abundantly clear this year. Corporations have seized Earth Day and turned it into a kind of holiday, which, like all holidays in modern America, affords ample opportunities to peddle more merchandise. Reusable shopping bags, Lexus Hybrid Living Suites, and other "eco-friendly" products are now to Earth Day what new cars are to Presidents Day. The trade journal Advertising Age neatly captured the trend in a recent headline that asked, "Is Earth Day the New Christmas?"

Most of these corporate greenwashing schemes are clumsy and transparent. But one company has developed a far more sophisticated, and ultimately much more dangerous, approach to manipulating environmental sentiment for its own expansion and profit.

Recognizing a way to burnish its tarnished image and lay the groundwork
for more growth, Wal-Mart launched a sustainability initiative two
years ago, complete with a benchmark measure of its carbon footprint, a
handful of long-range promises on energy use and waste, and plenty of
marketing.

As I wrote in an article in Grist last year, what makes Wal-Mart’s
initiatives more challenging to confront than simple greenwashing is
that they have just enough substance to have distracted many people,
including a number of leading environmentalists, from the fundamental
fact that, as a system of distributing goods to people, big-box
retailing is as intrinsically unsustainable as clear-cut logging is as
a method of harvesting trees.

The rise of big-box retailers over the last two decades has greatly
enlarged the total carbon footprint of the retail sector of our
economy. Thanks to chains like Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot,
shopping today is vastly more fossil fuel-intensive than it was just
twenty years ago.

There are three main sources for this growth in carbon emissions (all
documented in much more detail in my book Big-Box Swindle). One is the
conversion of tens of thousands of acres of CO2-absorbing fields and
forests into big-box stores and parking lots. These massive
single-story outlets with their moats of pavement are not only a
tremendously inefficient use of land, but a totally unnecessary one, as
evidenced by the millions of square feet of idle retail space [pdf] now
lurking in dead malls, vacant shopping centers, and empty downtown
storefronts.

Another way the big boxes have increased carbon emissions is by
destroying local businesses, pushing manufacturing overseas, and
replacing these regional networks of production and distribution with a
massive global supply chain. Today, most of the products we buy are
shipped, trucked, and flown ridiculously long distances. Global
transportation of goods is one of the fastest growing sources of
greenhouse gas emissions, and no company moves more stuff around the
planet than Wal-Mart.

But by far the largest impact big-box retailers have had on carbon
emissions has to do with driving. Since 1990, the number of miles that
the average American household drives each year for shopping has grown
by more than 40 percent. For the country as a whole, that’s an extra
100 billion miles on the road each year and more than 40 million metric
tons of additional carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere—all while
we’re running our errands.

We’re driving a lot more in general, but our shopping-related driving
has grown three times as fast as driving for all other purposes. The
reason has everything to do with the rise of the big boxes. Not only
have these retailers chosen to locate their stores on the outer fringe,
but their aggressive expansion has forced tens of thousands of local
stores to close. Instead of having a large number of grocers, hardware
stores, and other small-scale businesses, each serving a neighborhood
or town center, we now have a smaller number of massive superstores
that serve much larger regions. What that means is that most of us have
to travel a few miles further to pick up a gallon of milk or a new
shirt, and those extra miles add up to a significant increase in carbon
emissions.

Not one of these sources of carbon is included in Wal-Mart’s
calculation of its carbon footprint. And all of these issues—over-sized
stores, long-distance transportation—are fundamental to the company’s
business model. The best case scenario for Wal-Mart’s sustainability
initiative is to make a highly polluting operation somewhat less so.

But the best case scenario is not what Wal-Mart hopes to achieve. Like
everything the company does, its eco-initiatives are designed to
facilitate one overriding goal: growth. Improving its image and
enlisting the support of prominent environmental groups are key to its
expansion strategy. Since Wal-Mart announced its sustainability
initiative two years ago, the company has built 285 new stores in the
United States and almost 1,000 new stores in other countries. By its
own narrow measure, Wal-Mart’s CO2 emissions have gone up 9 percent.

Rather than buying into Wal-Mart’s green program, we as citizens should
be setting the sustainability agenda for the retail sector. What would
that look like? For starters, more cities and states should enact land
use and economic policies that put an end to the construction of
big-box stores and sprawling shopping centers. We need to stop
subsidizing corporate expansion and instead nurture a new generation of
neighborhood businesses. And we need to do our part as shoppers too by
avoiding the big chains as much as possible and giving our support
instead to local retailers and local producers.