Walmart Issue

2490 Words10 Pages
1.0 Introduction Companies around the world are focussing on incorporating sustainability policy and practices in their supply chain (Ageron et al, 2011). The topic of sustainability has been of great interest for the last decade and businesses have adopted a certain level of commitment towards sustainability practices (Hassini et al, 2012), yet some business tycoons suffer in developing an effective supply chain model. This report primarily discusses the issues that Wal-Mart is facing in establishing and maintaining a sustainable supply chain. The report outlines the company's origin and its progress in the years, followed by describing the issue it is faces. The issue described is related to Wal-Mart's failure to develop a Green…show more content…
Although Wal-Mart has taken adaptive measures to sustain their energy sources by using green power generators it still lags behind companies such as Whole Foods. 2.1.2 Excessive Land Usage It can be noticed that even though Wal-Mart are making an attempt to work towards sustainability their underlying business model has been proving hazardous towards building a process towards sustainability of the environment and the communities. Wal-Mart has over twenty-acre parking lots, 200,000 square-foot stores which require several miles of travel to get to. To add to this they have several hundred abandoned facilities left behind (The Atlantic Cities, 2012). The company seems to be moving towards opening smaller stores in the urban markets to expand their business because they have saturated the exurbs. They have set up over 1100 stores since 2005 in the United States and built on virgin land instead of redeveloping vacant retail properties (The Atlantic Cities, 2012). Sustainability buildings demand to be flexible buildings so that they can be used for several other purposes in the following years. But several Wal-Mart buildings do not demonstrate such flexibility, and usually are left unused in the neighbourhood thereby causing a toxic effect. Also, their buildings are so large that their energy efficiency is very poor; they not only use large amounts of electricity but also do not have the ability to use the natural sunlight as an alternative. 3.0 Analysis of
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