I attended Colorado State University back in 1975 and I have fond memories of the brilliant night skies once you got away from the light pollution of Fort Collins. Seeing those stars gets more difficult with each coming year and, some residents of Pagosa Springs believes, each coming Walmart. A Walmart parking lot is a […]

So, Walmart, the largest food retailer in the United States (world?) has joined other corporate entities in pledging to only sell eggs from cage-free chickens by 2025. Good on you Walmart, but why in 2025? Why not next year? Perhaps the reason is that not enough egg producers exist for cage-free eggs? For years that […]

(Previously in WALMART IS GREEN, GREENBACK GREEN… Part I, Part II.) Yesterday I began to examine Naomi Klein’s reporting on Walmart’s ties to Big Green—the cadre of once-environmental groups perverted by the lure of money and access provided by the worst of the polluters. Klein concludes: And this is the heart of the issue—not simply […]

(Previously in WALMART IS GREEN, GREENBACK GREEN…) Yesterday I began to examine Naomi Klein’s reporting on Walmart’s ties to Big Green—the cadre of once-environmental groups perverted by the lure of money and access provided by the worst of the polluters. Klein continues: Nor is the Environmental Defense Fund the only environmental organization to have benefited […]

In the early ’90s I was first editor of the Municipal Edition of Recycling Today and was later promoted to Executive Editor of the Recycling Media Group. (A few years later I helped launch and served as Senior Editor for the Crain Communications startup Waste News.) In those roles I had occasion to speak with […]

When a despoiler cut down six live oaks (if you’ve never seen a Live Oak, they are perhaps the East-Coast cousins of the West Coast Redwoods) and 44 other trees to make way for a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Savannah, Georgia, the Bentonvile Behemoth crossed all the t’s and dotted all the I’s. The company […]

Last Friday I noted Grist’s takedown of Walmart’s latest attempt to greenwash products with a faux environmental Sustainability Leaders label. This week the story is gathering legs: Wal-Mart recently rolled out a new public relations scheme to improve their public image, and make people think that they care about the environment. Unfortunately, as Stacy Mitchell […]

A standard is not a standard simply because the world’s largest pusher of cheap plastic crap from China says so, and given the Bentonvile Behemoth’s issues with monitoring vendors’ standards involving health and saftey, I’m less than enthusiastic about Walmart’s green made by sustainability leaders tag, and just what do those words really mean anyway? […]

Strictly speaking, this is not a problem unique to Walmart, but given the number of stores with ginormous parking lots coupled with the number of abandoned stores with empty parking lots, Walmart has to shoulder part of the blame for the increasingly damaging loads on storm sewers. I seriously doubt that the residents of Bellaire […]

Companies around the globe have rushed in recent years to slap a Green label on their products, their processes, their businesses. The term has no meaning because Green means whatever I, or anyone else, want it to mean. Until someone calls you out. From the Broward County New Times: A few blocks from the jewelry […]

From Democracy Now!: AMY GOODMAN: After Rob Walton, the chair of the board of Walmart, spoke, Democracy Now!’s Mike Burke attempted to question the Walmart chair. MIKE BURKE: Mr. Walton, can I ask you a question? ROB WALTON: Yeah. MIKE BURKE: From Democracy Now! radio and TV in New York. ROB WALTON: No, no, no. […]

By coincidence, I was just watching “Food, Inc.” again today.* Here is the pro-Walmart part of that otherwise great movie (and the part featuring my old buddy Rand Waddoups): The guy from Stonyfield (pictured above in the frozen frame) actually says the title quote to this post about five and a half minutes in. This […]

The first thing you should do now is read Jeff’s post on Black Friday. We’ve hit this story countless times before here, but this time it’s as crystal clear as it will ever be. Then watch this:

I really didn’t have the energy to blog about this over the last 24 hours. Lucky for us, Marion Nestle has taken care of it.

…except when it hinders their ability to pave California into a bigger parking lot than it already is. The hypocrisy is staggering, and shame on every environmentalist out there who continues to suffer from Walmart Compartmentalization Syndrome.