The Greening of Wal-Mart

Today's L.A. Times features an informative, in-depth article on Wal-Mart's greening initiatives:

"Wal-Mart Goes Green"

It goes into detail about specific initiatives, such as those used in their environmentally conscious demonstration store in Aurora, Colorado. The initiatives include getting power from wind turbines and solar panels, growing plants with drip irrigation, and building stores with environmentally conscious building materials — all used to varying degrees of success or failure. While the goal is to prepare a worldwide in-store rollout of these environmental experiments, Wal-Mart still has a ways to go before they can be widely and successfully implemented. Although these initiatives are not perfect, I laud Wal-Mart for making environmental consciousness an important part of their growth process, and hopefully it will spur their competitors to evolve their own programs at least on parity with those of Wal-Mart.