Earth to Walmart: Flat Screen TVs can never be green.
I am grateful to one of our readers for sending me an electronic version of an article from a very recent Walmart World called “A Sustainability Game-Changer.” The subject is the not-nearly-as-much-as-meets-the-eye Walmart Sustainability Index.
Despite recent backpedaling, the article is full of bragging. This is the part that caught my eye first:
“In early 2008, Walmart pledged to make the flat screen TVs we sell 30 percent more efficient by 2011. In July, John Fleming, executive vice president and chief merchandising officer for Walmart U.S. said, “I will tell you today, we have done that for next year.”
If you know anything about the environmental impact of flat-screen TVs, you know how low energy use ranks on the range of concerns associated with these devices. Compare that to this, for example:
The rising demand for flat-screen televisions could have a greater impact on global warming than the world’s largest coal-fired power stations, a leading environmental scientist warned yesterday.
Manufacturers use a greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride to make the televisions, and as the sets have become more popular, annual production of the gas has risen to about 4,000 tonnes.
As a driver of global warming, nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, yet no one knows how much of it is being released into the atmosphere by the industry, said Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, Irvine.
I have a crazy thought: If stuff like this makes Walmart customers more likely to buy a bigger, more-poisonous TV, the company’s environmental initiatives might actually be making the environment worse, not better! But then what would Treehugger and Grist have left to write about?
I don’t know that I agree with this. I mean, ok, TV’s – an type – are never going to be ‘good’ for the environment but. like cars, they have become one of the things that people in the main are unwilling to do without.
With that in mind, manufacturers doing what they can to reduce their impact can only be a good thing. Maybe we should look to the bigger sources of environmental pollution for the bigger impact such as planes and factories – oh no, people won’t want to be without them either!