Earlier this month, my roommate picked up a September issue of Fast Company, a magazine geared towards the business world, with information on mangagement, leadership, and career advice.
To my good fortune, September's issue happened to be all about green. Talk about perfect timing. On the cover was a young man, holding a plant with the cover story reading: "He Sold His Soul to Wal-Mart". Something wasn't making sense to me and from the cover I thought to myself, "Wal-Mart and environmentalism...kind of an unlikely pair."
The man on the cover is Adam Werbach, a 34-year old environmentalist who ironically, has abadoned mainstream methods of environmetalism to strengthen his efforts for a more sustainable environment. At 23, Werbach was one of the youngest presidents of the Sierra Club. He's also co-founded the Apollo Alliance, created to support and lead the way towards an alternative-energy economy, and started Act Now, a company geared towards positioning businesses to a greener customer base along the way. Today, with Act Now, Werbach is embracing what could be one of his most ambitious goals: transforming Wal-Mart into an environmentally sustainable business.
In the article, Werbach talks about how Wal-Mart become his biggest client for Act Now. One of the main obstacles Werbach saw in Wal-Mart's goal in becoming a more sustainable business was the appeal of Wal-Mart's low prices which would indefinitely supercede the appeal of sustainability. He points out that even if green products make it to the shelf, how do you get people to buy them?
Werbach realized that the only way to get people to change their habits was to get the company, and its employees to care about sustainability. Through the development of what is now the Personal Sustainability Project, Werbach and Andy Ruben, Wal-Mart's vice president of sustainability, have created a way to show how even the smallest changes can benefit the environment greatly. It is a program that encourages Wal-Mart's employees to apply sustainability into their own lives and share it with others.
Who would have guessed that Wal-Mart would become a business for the environment? This article shows that the trend of being green has picked up in places, no one would have ever imagined. For Werbach, he mentions that it's not the goals of environmentalism that aren't enough for him, it's the methods that aren't effective. These methods paired with sustainability result in sacrifice. His method with Wal-Mart however, doesn't involve sacrifice at all and focuses on baby steps in making changes: "People care about themselves first, so you have to start with what's important in their lives."
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