Walmart pledges to eliminate tons of greenhouse gases

Walmart plans to eliminate 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its global supply chain by the end of 2015. This represents 1½ times the company's estimated global carbon footprint growth over the next 5 years and is the equivalent of taking more than 3.8 million cars off the road for a year.
Walmart collaborated with Environmental Defense Fund to develop this approach that looks at the supply chain on a global scale. Other advisers include: PricewaterhouseCoopers, ClearCarbon Inc., the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Applied Sustainability Center at the Univ. of Ark. The group will identify projects, quantify reductions, engage suppliers and ensure proper procedures are followed for each greenhouse gas reduction claim.
The greenhouse gas reduction program has three main components:
Selection: Walmart will focus on the product categories with the highest embedded carbon. This approach ensures the project team focuses on the categories that have the greatest opportunity for reductions. Reductions can come from any part of a product’s life cycle.
Action: For a project to be included as part of this goal, it must reduce greenhouse gases from a product in either the sourcing of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, customer use or end-of-life disposal. Walmart must demonstrate it had direct influence on the reduction and show how that reduction would not have occurred without Walmart’s participation.
Assessment: Suppliers and Walmart will jointly account for the reductions. ClearCarbon will perform a quality assurance review of those claims to ensure methodology, completeness and calculations are correct. When the claims meet the quality assurance check, PricewaterhouseCoopers will assess under consulting standards whether the defined procedures were followed consistently to quantify the reduction claim.