Well it looks as though Walmart is keeping up the pressure on the industry to improve its environmental performance, which is not a bad thing if it helps saves the planet and makes everyone in the supply chain more aware of their responsibilities.  Walmart announced they will be asking their suppliers 15 simple questions (see below) about how they produced the product and packaging. The questions fall into 4 categories:

• Energy and Climate: Reducing Energy Costs and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Material Efficiency: Reducing Waste and Enhancing Quality
• Natural Resources: Producing High Quality, Responsibly Sourced Raw Materials
• People and Community: Ensuring Responsible and Ethical Production

This is an effort to help to create a sustainability index number to provide customers with product information in a simple, convenient, easy to understand rating, so they can make choices and consume in a more sustainable way.

So what does this mean to the packaging industry?

Those companies who design and develop packaging will need to know and understand these 15 questions and how they contribute to their customers’ answers as suppliers to Walmart.

Have a read and let us know what you think.

Thanks go out to Branding & Marketing Guru @chrisbrown330 for bringing our attention to this article

You can read Chris’ full article at: http://tinyurl.com/nvmwva

Tags: business, environment, ethical, packaging, Retailers, waste

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Business News, Design, Environmental Issues, Innovation, Materials, Opinion, Recycling, Retailers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.