The experimental Wlal-Mart store in Aurora, Colo.

The eight-mile drive along Pena Boulevard, which connects Denver International Airport to Interstate 70, traverses an emerging exurban landscape. Marriott residential hotels, business parks and “for lease” signs dot the fields bordering the highway. Lone construction trailers announce future subdivisions — “Wolf Creek Run” — and fast food appears to be the only option.

But just beyond the Airport Road exit, an unfamiliar scene unfolds against the sky. White propellers spin, first slowly, then fast, on a yellow tail. Drive closer, and the outline of a sleek 143-foot-tall wind turbine takes shape — in the parking lot of a 206,000 square foot Wal-Mart Supercenter.

The juxtaposition is incongruous, if not entirely unexpected. The Wal-Mart Supercenter in Aurora, Col., is one of two experimental stores (the second is in McKinney, Texas) intended to advance the company’s ambitious new “sustainability” mandate. In a shot heard around the world, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott in 2005 delivered a speech to employees heralding a new era of sustainable business operations for the world’s biggest corporation.

The company’s goals include meeting 100 percent of its energy needs with renewable power, creating zero waste, and shifting to environmentally superior consumer products, including organically grown food. The experimental stores are ground zero. Wal-Mart opened the Aurora Supercenter in fall 2005 and contracted with the National Renewable Energy Lab of Golden, Col., to provide testing and analysis on store systems and materials. A control store in nearby Centennial provides a baseline against which the environmental benefits of the Aurora site are measured.

Wal-Mart’s (NYSE: WMT) legion of critics have puzzled over the significance of a possible born-again behemoth. Are the company’s goals all about “greenwashing”? Or will Wal-Mart use its tremendous buying power to catalyze multiple market transformations in green building, product development and renewable energy?

“There’s no question when Wal-Mart pays attention to environmental issues they are given a validity and importance that is unique because they are the biggest corporation in the world,” says Jeffrey Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation, a manufacturer of environmentally themed household products [see “Hollender reflects on ‘What Matters Most,’” SIJ, May 2004].

But Wal-Mart’s sustainability initiatives are compromised by a lack of transparency and companywide commitment to social responsibility, said Hollender, who met with CEO Lee Scott in Bentonville last spring and maintains an ongoing dialogue with Andy Rubin, vice president of corporate strategy.

“Their corporate culture is not aligned around these issues at all,” says Hollender.

As a metaphor, the wind turbine in the parking lot speaks volumes. Will American ingenuity continue to service big, cheap sprawl? Or does a commitment to clean innovation suggest a new era of corporate accountability and social change?

Visiting the Aurora store is a fascinating exercise, not because of the exhibition of new products and technologies, which don’t always push the envelope, but because of the anomalous context in which they are applied.

“Wal-Mart is fully focused on being the low cost leader,” says Burt Flickinger, a New York retail consultant and Wal-Mart shareholder. “Lowest common denominator construction costs, lowest common denominator labor costs.”

The company should be commended for its environmental initiatives, Flickinger adds. “But I look at history to help predict the future.”



At first glance, the Aurora store is indistinguishable from the typical Wal-Mart Supercenter. The bulky, low-slung building contains 195,000 square feet of groceries, baked goods, consumer electronics, along with a vision and garden center. Ubiquitous black and white tags — “Always low prices” — provide needless reminders of the company’s core philosophy.

A closer look, however, reveals dozens of test sites in various stages of development. The demonstrations begin outside. Illuminated stop signs are powered by photovoltaic panels. Permeable pavement edges the parking lot. Construction workers shore up infiltration ponds with concrete blocks recycled from the runway of the former Stapleton Airport. Isolated plots of native landscaping reflect the site’s history as a “short grass prairie,” featuring wheat and gamma grasses and little bluestar, according to an interpretive sign.

Inside, huge banners proclaim the company’s commitment to conservation, recycling and renewable energy. Floor stencils explain technologies and concepts to customers, a kiosk documents real-time energy savings from selected experiments, and a cut-out wall reveals the inner workings of a radiant heating system.

The building’s initial costs were “pretty big,” says Don Moseley, senior project engineer in the prototype and new formats department, speaking on the phone from Bentonville.

Moseley says the Aurora site is a testing ground, not a prototype, and that Wal-Mart is “diligently working with vendors for things that have merit, and for opportunities to be successful in our overall program.”

For example, the store’s 134-kilowatt system of roof-mounted photovoltaic glass and plastic laminates features trial products from three different companies. “Many of the experiments are quite small in scale,” says Moseley, noting that a solar application would have to generate at least 400 to 600 kilowatts to pencil out economically.

The store’s most visible green attributes include enormous white fabric ducts slung from the ceiling to distribute cool air more efficiently, and a saw tooth roof with large windows, which allow natural light into the entire shopping area. Behind the scenes, waste cooking oil is collected and burned to generate heat, while a combined cogeneration system assists in providing electricity, heating and cooling. Other features include waterless urinals, countertops made from recycled glass and concrete, and bamboo flooring in the vision center.



Arbiters of sustainable business generally agree on the significance of Wal-Mart’s environmental initiatives: the potential ripple effect on the entire supply chain.

“If you can get the biggest, most energy-intensive companies in their sector to adopt green values, the system will follow,” says Kyle Datta, a senior director at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a Colorado-based nonprofit. “That’s a huge win for society.” RMI’s clients include The Coca Cola Co. (NYSE: KO) and Shell; the institute is now working with Wal-Mart on energy-efficiency solutions. “If Wal-Mart follows through, they will be among the top 20 percent of companies in terms of starting to systematically look at all operations,” Datta says.

Tyler Elm, Wal-Mart’s senior director of sustainability, says Wal-Mart’s strategy is to leverage economies of scale to mainstream environmentally superior technologies. Defying a tradition of secrecy, the company is eager to share information about such practices with competitors, Elm says. “The more people know about these technologies, the greater the scale, the lower the cost can be applied, and the greater the environmental benefit for everyone,” he says.

The company is already applying lessons learned from the Aurora site. One of the biggest success stories is an energy-efficient light emitting diode (LED) lighting system used in the store’s dairy and frozen food department. In conventional stores, display cases are open, allowing refrigerated air to escape. In the experimental store, glass doors have been added to the display cases, reducing the electricity load by an estimated 600,000 kilowatts per year. New doors require new lighting. In less than 18 months, Elm says, Wal-Mart worked with General Electric (NYSE: GE) to move the LED system from lab to store. Wal-Mart is rolling out the new technology globally, and it eventually plans to bring the lighting system to stores as a consumer product.

“What we’re finding is that sustainability becomes a mechanism for us to incorporate innovation into the business model,” Elm says. Another example is a baler used to flatten and package plastic apparel bags, which are sold to manufacturers for use in new products. “We went from paying someone to haul the plastic to a landfill to developing a revenue stream for that waste,” he says.

Elm acknowledges an early emphasis on “low-hanging fruit.” Nevertheless, green vendors who supplied products to the Aurora site say they were impressed with the integrity of the experimental enterprise.

”I can’t speak to what goes on in the board room,” says Mike Bergey, founder and president of Bergey Windpower, which supplied the store’s 50-kilowatt wind turbine, the first commercial installation of the new model. “But on the implementation level, they went about it in a serious way and tossed out sexy technologies that are just not ready for commercialization, such as fuel cells.”

According to Moseley, initial results for the month of May suggest that over the half of the store’s electricity needs were generated by alternative energy sources.



A tour of the Aurora store often resembles a fall down the rabbit hole: things get curiouser and curiouser. Phone interviews with executive staff are tightly regulated by Wal-Mart’s public relations firm, Edelman Public Relations. On-site tours, however, are sometimes led by store managers who possess little or no technical background, and who are visibly uncomfortable in their role as avatars of innovation. “You kind of feel like an idiot,” says Alberta Fears, an Aurora co-manager who conducts two or three tours a month with manual in hand, important sections highlighted in yellow.

Working at the Aurora site has raised her environmental awareness, says Fears — up to a point. Pausing in front of the organic foods section, Fears declaims: “I didn’t feed my kids organic, and they turned out fine.”

The native plants “raggedy” aesthetics, she adds, prompted a mowing directive from the Wal-Mart district manager. “I said, ‘We can’t do that! It’s supposed to be environmentally friendly!”

During a stop at the store’s highly touted food composting locker, a Wal-Mart associate picked up a crate of red peppers and dumped the entire contents into an adjacent garbage chute. Responding to Fears’ inquiries, the associate explained the compost facility had been locked since her first day on the job.

In the employee break room, solar tube skylights obviate the need for traditional light fixtures during the day. But at 2 p.m., all the lights were turned on, and employees responded blankly to Fears’ reprimand. A subsequent inquiry to an associate regarding organic cotton baby clothes elicited directions to the nearest Whole Foods — despite the presence of a “George” organic baby line just a few steps away.

Collectively, the glitches are as symbolic of the new Wal-Mart enterprise as the wind turbine. Labor issues have always been the company’s nemesis, and it’s no surprise that low-wage employees, even at the experimental store, seem to lack the encouragement or incentives to buy into their employer’s sustainability vision.

“The real challenge for Wal-Mart is to be as clear-cut and definitive on the social side as they have been on the environmental side,” says Hollender, adding that Wal-Mart’s inconsistent corporate culture is one reason Seventh Generation products have yet to find their place on company shelves. “We also need transparency about impacts generally, not just specific issues for which they have solutions.”

At the Aurora store, other green metrics appear to have fallen by the wayside. Located in a massive new suburban development, the store reinforces the auto-oriented land use patterns linked to traffic congestion, air pollution and consumption of forest and farmland — or in this case, short grass prairie. Efforts to reduce the company’s transportation impacts focus on fuel-efficient vehicles, not smart growth, says Tim Yatsko, Wal-Mart senior vice president of transportation. (By 2015, he says, the company plans to improve the efficiency of its trucking fleet by 100 percent). Nor does the store incorporate provisions for buying locally sourced products, although Elm says a “regionally sold, regionally grown” program already operates in 20 states. During Wal-Mart’s 2000 annual meeting, says Burt Flickinger, Wal-Mart unveiled an ambitious environmental strategy subsequently abandoned after a change in management. Since then, he adds, Wal-Mart’s stock price has declined almost 20 percent.

“Consumers have a lot of concerns about the company,” Flickinger says. If Wal-Mart follows through on its latest set of green initiatives, investors could start seeing a higher rate of return.

The Aurora store is a great demonstration site, says RMI’s Datta. “Now we want to see the next 100 buildings,” he says. “Then we’ll have proof of the pudding.”