Free Flip by Peter Sheahan

insurance), gender discrimination and a devastating impact on small local businesses, Wal-Mart regularly faces a negative public relations picture. A number of communities in the US have lobbied successfully to keep Wal-Mart from opening a store in their vicinity. CEO Lee Scott admitted that when Wal-Mart began to explore an environmental sustainability agenda in 2004, it was simply 'a defensive strategy'.
    Since then Wal-Mart has embraced sustainability with a passion, and Scott told Fortune magazine, 'What I thought was going to be a defensive strategy is turning out to be precisely the opposite.'Wal-Mart's environmental goals include a 25 per cent increase in the efficiency of its truck fleet within three years and a 100 per cent increase within ten years, a 30 per cent decrease in store energy use and a 25 per cent reduction in solid waste.Wal-Mart now sees sustainability not only as good public relations but as good for Wal-Mart, both in terms of millions of dollars saved in lower energy, packaging and other costs and in terms of heightened morale and productivity on the part of employees, who have a new reason to be proud of where they work.
    Wal-Mart is such a big company – 2006 turnover was US$312 billion, there are 1.8 million direct Wal-Mart employees, and 176 million unique customers visit its 6600 stores every week – that its decisions have a huge ripple effect. With a supply chain network of 60,000 suppliers around the world, Wal-Mart can shift many markets towards greater sustainability. For example, it has made a commitment to sell salmon only from sustainable fisheries, and Wal-Mart now has fourteen 'sustainable value [supplier] networks' for everything from chemicals to food and paper products. One of its biggest recent successes with customers, organic cotton clothing, has helped to grow global organic cotton production by over 20 per cent since 2001.Wal-Mart's flip into a green brand identity is now being emulated by North America's second largest retailer, the Home Depot, which is branding thousands of the products it sells with an 'Eco Options' label. 1
    Green is cool. People want to be seen as green, and they want to work for and buy from companies that they see as green too. This has led to a whole host of companies leveraging their environmentally friendly practices to attract and inspire staff, and to attract and retain customers too.
    One of the more interesting such companies is BP, a case study in the pros and cons of offering a 'green' alternative to the oil business as usual. In 1998 BP, otherwise known as British Petroleum, acquired the Amoco Corporation, an American business. To make the deal palatable in the US, it was presented as a merger and the company temporarily became BP Amoco. In 2001 Amoco was dropped from the name, and the company once more became BP. Only now BP no longer stood for British Petroleum, it was simply an 'initialism' that company marketing presented in advertising as standing for 'Beyond Petroleum'. Along with this came a new logo, a green and gold disk representing Helios, the Greek god of the sun.
    No longer trading as 'British Petroleum' was useful because it sidestepped longstanding criticism of corporate colonialism in BP's traditional market strongholds in ex- British colonies in Africa and elsewhere. But no doubt more important, especially in markets such as the UK, US and Australia, was the desire to appeal to public concern about the environment.
    In this regard, BP's CEO at the time, John Browne, aka Baron Browne of Madingley, showed remarkable prescience. In 1997, the company withdrew from the Global Climate Coalition, an oil industry organisation dedicated to promoting climate change scepticism, with Lord Browne commenting that 'the time to consider [global warming] is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change has been conclusively proven, but when the possibility cannot be discounted and is taken seriously by the society of which we