As part of the Feb 10th Green Business Summit, David Cheesewright made some ‘major announcements’ for Walmart Canada. Here are the strongest 2:

Sustainable Product Index: This will be a system designed to “… help customers across Canada evaluate the sustainability of the products they purchase, from raw materials to disposal.” It is to be implemented in 3 phases:

– Phase 1 – Supplier assessment
– Phase 2 – Creation of database
– Phase 3 – Development and launch of customer tool

This could one day prove to be as powerful a tool as the ‘Nutritional Information’ labeling we all rely on for our food shopping. The trick will be establishing criteria that consistently work across geography and product types.

Green Briefs POV: IMHO,  it wouldn’t hurt to come up with a different name. “Sustainable Product Index” makes it sound like a review of goods that are already sustainable. “Product Sustainability Index” would be closer to the mark.

For more info, here’s Walmarts corporate release.

Welcome to ShareGreen.ca – A new business sustainability resource: This is meant to be the start of a virtual ‘centre of excellence’ for Canadian businesses going green. Among other things, itt features sustainability case studies from Canada’s top brands.

“We have a great opportunity to usher in a new era of collaboration and sharing when it comes to green business practices,” said David Cheesewright, President and CEO of Walmart Canada. “While much work still needs to be done, there is already some strong sustainability work happening across Canadian organizations. Our hope is that the launch of ShareGreen will be a first step to help capture green practices and drive collaboration.”

Green Briefs POV: Looks like a good idea. Though as media colleague Colin Isaacs (Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment) pointed out in the media scrum, a case study by Nestle Water Canada on bottled water, seems to fly a bit in the face of many people who believe the category itself is eco-evil. So it could to be hard to regulate.

You can’t win ’em all.

For more, here’s the official release.

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