World's largest corporation shares resources with smaller companies on going green.

1. 00 • PRINTACTION • JULY 2011
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IT’S A BIG, WIDE WORLD OUT THERE

2. T
he next generation of packaging went on
display June 21 to 23 at PackEx, a bien-
nial tradeshow of sector software, hard-
ware and services, billed as Canada’s largest
such exhibition, now in its 35th year of op-
eration. The scores of eye-opening marvels
amassed on the showfloor at the Toronto
Congress Centre were reinforced by two sig-
nal events organized by PAC – The Packag-
ing Association: One was PAC’s influential
Leadership Awards competition, recogniz-
ing packaging innovations in design, tech-
nical achievement, and environmental
sustainability,and the other was an intensive
3-day conference program highlighting the
latest in packaging technology and trends.
Walmart Canada Corp. gained promi-
nence at both events by sponsoring its own
Best of Show Award in this year’s competi-
tion and by hosting its fifth annual Sustain-
able Packaging Conference for one day of
the conference proceedings. According to
PAC President and CEO James Downham,
Walmart’s Sustainable Packaging Confer-
ence has emerged as one of the most-im-
portant and well-attended forums for the
packaging community.
In a written welcome in Walmart’s con-
ference brochure, Downham explains that
environmental sustainability continues to
be one of packaging’s top priorities, owing
to the growing prominence of Extended
Producer Responsibility or EPR. Briefly
stated, EPR is an environmental policy that
extends a producer’s responsibility for a
product to the post-consumer stage of the
product’s life cycle, requiring producers to
design and implement stewardship pro-
grams to achieve waste-reduction targets.
“EPR is the game changer that is shifting
risk and opportunity across the packaging
value chain,” Downham’s welcome states.
“Cost to producers for taking on end-of-life
product responsibilities are projected well
into the billions. It is becoming clear that
new thinking and leadership is necessary to
help transition industry towards a future
with Sustainably Financed Municipal Solid
Waste. In response, PAC is assembling in-
dustry leaders to proactively address this
pressing issue.
“To ensure inclusiveness and transparency,
PAC is including important stakeholders
from the recovery community and govern-
ment. Our focus is on optimizing,mobilizing
and mitigating risk of end-of-life solutions
for packaging design, recovery (collection
and processing) and end markets.”
Sharing Walmart’s
resources for sustainability
Ranked as the world’s largest corporation by
annual revenues (a figure Walmart Canada
President and CEO David Cheeseworth
cites as $400 billion), Walmart certainly
possesses the necessary resources and influ-
ence to take on a global leadership role in
environmental sustainability.Many of Wal-
mart’s Toronto conference presentations,
conducted by environmental heavy hitters
both from inside Walmart and from other
key external organizations, filled a room
with 850 seats, often leaving several dozen
additional listeners standing at the back.
The report below summarizes just a few
very brief highlights of the extensive infor-
mation they provided.
Cheesewright, whose former achieve-
ments include successfully introducingWal-
mart’s supercentre format into Canada,
presently oversees a growing chain of 325
Canadian stores and over 85,000 associates,
serving more than 1-million customers a
day. In the conference brochure and a for-
mal address, he emphasized his company’s
commitment to sharing information on en-
vironmental sustainability widely:“At Wal-
mart, we strongly believe that sustainability
should not be a competitive advantage. For
this reason, we remain committed to host-
ing events like this one,where we create op-
portunities for industry leaders to learn
from each other and share information with
the goal of becoming sustainable,”he writes.
His speech to conference attendees con-
firms:“You should be able to get any infor-
mation you want to hear about Walmart’s
sustainability practices. If not, pick up the
phone and tell me. We will share anything
with anybody – competitor or not.”
Later, in a personal interview, I asked him
how PrintAction readers, who are primarily
employed by or own relatively small printing
companies,would fit intoWalmart’s scenario.
He replied that in business, because of Wal-
mart’s huge scale, instead of trying to com-
pete with Walmart, it often makes better
sense for smaller businesses to leverage the
special strengths of being small – strengths
such as service, flexibility, and uniqueness –
in a way that big businesses can’t.
But Cheesewright says sustainability is a
different matter: His company urges sup-
pliers of every size to try to understand what
Walmart is trying to achieve and emulate
their approach that, to be effective, sustain-
ability must reach right through the struc-
ture of the business from the executives
down to the grassroots level. He insists on
the necessity of embedding sustainability
throughout an organization’s culture:
“It’s important to be open to feedback,
not just about what’s working well, but also
what doesn’t work and what we could do
better. Walmart operates on an open-door
concept that allows any associate to raise
any issue of concern – either directly or
anonymously, if they choose – without any
negative repercussions. Besides often pro-
viding useful insights, it’s an amazingly
good way to keep in touch with what is
going on.”
Additionally, Cheesewright’s speech out-
lines Walmart’s My Sustainability Plan
(MSP) program that gives Walmart associ-
ates a vehicle to integrate environmental
practices directly into their daily lives. The
plan asks them to identify something they
are passionate about in the categories of
Planet, Health, or Life, then commit to a
plan to make it part of their daily lives,track
their progress, and share their story to in-
spire others. Cheeseworth reports that in
the 18 months this program has been run-
ning, more than half of all Walmart associ-
ates have developed MSPs. Examples of
their initiatives include quitting smoking,
recycling, carpooling, or switching to sus-
tainable products.
My Walmart Plan
VICTORIA GAITSKELL
16 • PRINTACTION • JULY 2011
Continued on page 28
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“We kept hearing that associates were
really concerned about the environment,
but most people didn’t have a clue what to
do about it as individuals. The MSP pro-
gram gives people a tangible way to get
started and really do something,” he
recounts in his speech, adding that his own
personal MSP is a regular morning bicycle
ride with colleagues.
Cheesewright recommends that printers
and other businesses could implement
something like the MSP program with their
staff,as well as participate in ShareGreen.ca
– a Website Walmart launched last year to
provide Canadian businesses with sustain-
ability resources and enable them to share
case studies and comments.
“Nothing is better than sharing ideas,”
Cheeseworth affirms in his speech.“We can
make progress in sustainability by commit-
ting time and passion, but the real answers
are about collaboration and the ability to
collaborate in areas where we have not nor-
mally been able to collaborate before.”
He asked the audience to go through the
day seeking out people they had never met
and looking at how to forge collaborative
partnerships with them going forward.
“Don’t miss the fact that the contacts you
make will be as valuable as the content you
hear,”he says.
Why green marketing
needs to come clean
Another conference presenter, Scott Mc-
Dougall, is President and CEO of Terra-
Choice and author of three studies called
“The Sins of Greenwashing”that have been
attracting regular mass-media attention in
North America and abroad since 2007.
His company’s Website defines ‘green-
washing’ as: “the act of misleading con-
sumers regarding the environmental
practices of a company or the environmen-
tal benefits of a product or service.” It sub-
divides this practice into seven categories or
“Sins” according to the type of misrepre-
sentation being committed.
For instance,The Sin of No Proof entails
“an environmental claim that cannot be
substantiated by easily accessible support-
ing information or by a reliable third-party
certification.”Common examples are facial
or toilet tissues that claim to contain vari-
ous percentages of post-consumer recycled
materials without providing any support-
ing evidence.
The Sin of Vagueness entails“a claim that
is so poorly defined or broad that its real
meaning is likely to be misunderstood by
the consumer.” For example, the overused
term‘all-natural’could well describe ingre-
dients such as arsenic, uranium, mercury,
and formaldehyde, since all are naturally
occurring – and toxic – substances. To
avoid sins of vagueness,McDougall suggest
that marketers should replace such inex-
plicit terms as “green” , “environmentally
friendly”, or “eco-friendly,” with more
precise explanations of what they mean; for
example,“30 percent recycled content”.
Perhaps short of The Sin of Fibbing, the
most blatant greenwashing transgression is
The Sin of Worshiping False Labels: “a
product that, through either words or
images, gives the impression of third-party
endorsement where no such endorsement
exists.” As evidence of the false-label phe-
nomenon, McDougall shows the audience
Gaitskell
Continued from page 16
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a fictitious “Certified Environmentally
Conscious”seal of approval he bought on-
line for $15! As an antidote to fake labels,
his study includes a list of 24 certification
standards or programs that are recognized
as legitimate. He points out that green ad-
vertising has more than tripled in the last
three years, and although some players in
the marketplace are manipulating the op-
portunity adversely with such devices as
false labels,he offers the encouragement:“If
you get it right,then your marketing will be
very, very effective.”
McDougall admits that his studies have
attracted media attention partly because of
the deliberate salaciousness of their titles.
But additionally, he notes that so far the
third study, investigating 5,296 products
making green claims in the United States
and Canada, and released in the last quar-
ter of 2010,has attracted 244-million media
impressions. He believes this astronomical
publicity count proves that his latest study
has hit a nerve because today’s world is
watching green claims closely.
He elaborates on the implications of this
surveillance for businesses:“If you make in-
vestments in sustainable packaging, you
run a risk of scrutiny. And if you hit that
nerve the wrong way, all that work and
good intentions run the risk of backfiring.
So you need to pay attention to the issue of
greenwashing and take a genuine sustain-
ability proposition to market. And if you
do, why would you not want to receive this
level of scrutiny?”
McDougall reports that 95 percent of the
products he studied most recently were
found to be committing one of the Seven
Sins.“But to consumers faced with this re-
ality, we still say keep buying the products,
because you need to send the signal with
your dollars that you want more green
products in the marketplace. There is evi-
dence that the more we continue to de-
mand green products while simultaneously
demanding more transparency, companies
are responding constructively.So keep buy-
ing green products and, when you’re of-
fered the choice between one that’s more
transparent and informative versus one
that’s not, choose the ones that are more
transparent.”
Based on this rationale,McDougall urges
green marketers to confess and repent their
sustainability sins: “If you admit your lim-
itations and reveal your products and your-
self as on a journey, your customers are
willing to join you on that journey.You can
say things like: ‘We’re not sustainable, but
we think we know what it looks like. Look
at this step we’ve taken.’
“Being sustainable starts with the will-
ingness to reveal the detail and imperfec-
tions in your claim. We don’t trust people
or products who purport to be perfect – es-
pecially not in as complicated a claim as en-
vironmental sustainability.”
McDougall concedes that his company’s
slant on sustainability differs from Wal-
mart’s: “David Cheesewright says sustain-
ability should not be a competitive edge,and
that Walmart wants to share sustainability
intelligence with everybody who’s interested.
But the fact is that not everyone takes ad-
vantage of these kinds of opportunities the
right way.We want you to use sustainability
to win in the marketplace and take market-
share away from those who don’t care.”
Victoria Gaitskell is keen to exchange ideas
with readers at victoria@printaction.com