Wal-Mart's Sustainability Experiment

Wal-Mart is trying to experiment whether it can sell products that are produced sustainably.

Thank you Wal-Mart for trying this attempt. I think the era of making extremely cheap products that break within a year and cause pollution should be over hopefully.

Here are my thoughts.

First, Wal-Mart consumers are there for the low price rather than sustainability. Hence, it is uncertain whether this sustainable products will sell. I think Wal-Mart might be more successful if they test in stores in areas with high college students, who at least somewhat care about sustainability.

Second, sustainability is quite hard to define. I am sure that the Sustainability Consortium (TSC) is doing its best to promote sustainability but measuring how sustainable it is quite challenging given that it is hard measure the impact of the products throughout the production. For instance, how would we measure the effect of soil pollution when a factory produces various products? How do we tease out the effect of pollution for each product? Also, a lot of sustainability issues may not be apparent in the short term (e.g. overfishing).

I am confident that with time, we would be able to measure sustainability better but just keep in mind that measurement and quantification is quite difficult. And excessive trust on deficient measurement or quantification can lead to unintended consequences.