Another reason to boycott Walmart

The nation's largest retailer isn't just backtracking on diversity. It's also backtracking on cleaning up its messes.

Plastic waste floods a beach. A recent study found that 56 companies, including Walmart, are responsible for 50 percent of branded plastic waste worldwide. Source: Getty Images

Another nationwide boycott of Walmart wrapped up last week, marking the second organized protest of the retail giant’s decision to backtrack on its diversity, equity and inclusion commitments.

But diversity isn’t the only principle the country’s largest retailer has shied away from since Donald Trump was elected president. Over the last six months, Walmart has also walked back multiple promises to reduce its massive impact on plastic waste and climate change—two crises that disproportionately harm Black and Brown communities.

Backtracking on plastic

The latest example, so far only reported on by trade publications, is that Walmart has quietly left the U.S. Plastics Pact, one of the world’s largest frameworks for addressing the unbelievable scourge of plastic pollution. The company’s exit was first reported by Packaging Dive.

Walmart is one of the world’s largest plastic polluters. Last year, a global study published last year in the journal Science Advances found that just 56 companies, including Walmart, were responsible for half of the world’s branded plastic pollution. The study collected and analyzed more than 1,870,000 pieces of plastic waste over five years across 84 countries.

Walmart had originally joined the U.S. Plastics Pact “to ensure that plastics never become waste by eliminating the plastics we don’t need, innovating to ensure that the plastics we do need are reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and circulating all the plastic items we use to keep them in the economy and out of the environment,” according to the company’s own words. Walmart did not respond to reporters’ requests to explain the exit.

The news of Walmart’s exit from the plastic pact came just two months after the company announced it would not meet its publicly-advertised goals for plastic pollution reduction and recycling—and had, in fact, increased its use of virgin plastic in private-brand packaging.

In that announcement, which was also reported on only by trade publications, Walmart said “many factors outside of our control” contributed to the failure. Those factors included public policy and the technical scalability of alternative sources. But Walmart also blamed “societal behavior change.” In other words, consumers.

Image source: Packaging Dive

Backtracking on climate

Walmart’s also been scaling back its commitments to fighting the climate crisis since Trump’s election. In March, the Financial Times reported that Walmart removed the portion of its website that said it was “deeply committed to addressing climate change.”

In a statement on its website in the middle of last year, the retailer said: “Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. If we don’t take more aggressive action now, the damage will only worsen, and the consequences will be disastrous for this and future generations.”

In December, these references were removed and the text on the webpage significantly shortened and rewritten. The retailer, which did not respond to a request for comment, on its webpage continued to include that it was “focused on reducing emissions in our operations [and] engaging suppliers to reduce emissions in supply chains”.

The website changes came around the same time that Walmart announced that it wouldn’t meet its previously-set climate goals for the second time in two years. Walmart’s original pledge was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its operations by 35 percent in 2025; by 65 percent in 2030; and by 100 percent by 2040. In 2023, Walmart said it would not meet its 2025 goal, but stood by the 2030 goal. One year later, after Trump’s election, the company added it wouldn’t meet the 2030 target either—and had, in fact, increased its emissions from 2022 to 2023.

Walmart now says its 2040 net zero goal is still on the table, but is urging caution. In the same vein as its failed plastic goal announcement, the company said that reaching climate goals would depend on “factors beyond our control”—namely, climate policy. Walmart says it can’t achieve net zero if there’s no policies to promote technology they need, like clean energy infrastructure, technology to reduce pollution from refrigeration and HVAC systems, and replacements for heavy tractor transportation.

The need for public policy change is certainly legitimate. At the same time, Walmart could be exercising its vast power as one of the world’s largest companies to loudly advocate for those changes at the federal level—and it isn’t. In fact, Walmart is choosing the path of least resistance, softening its public stance on climate change and assuming consumers will not care enough for it to meaningfully affect the company.

Is boycotting the answer?

It’s important to note that Walmart hasn’t abandoned all of its commitments to reduce plastic and pollution. As Packaging Dive reported:

Walmart engages with other industry coalitions related to packaging transformation. It’s a co-founder of the EPR [Extended Producer Responsibility] Leadership Forum, a group that also includes Mondelēz, Mars, Nestlé and L’Oréal USA, as well as Amcor, Coca-Cola, Ikea, Keurig Dr Pepper, Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, SC Johnson and Target. Walmart is also a founding member of Circular Action Alliance, the industry-founded producer responsibility organization leading EPR implementation in multiple U.S. states.

But Walmart may be feeling more pressure to abandon its climate and plastic commitments than it is to keep them, much less to actually live up to them. The company is currently the subject of a campaign by the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-wing nonprofit that pressures corporations to drop initiatives it decries as liberal.

The NLPC, which denies the existence of both the plastic pollution crisis and the climate crisis, is pushing a shareholder resolution that urges Walmart to reexamine its commitments to reducing plastic waste and addressing climate change. When Walmart left the U.S. Plastics Pact, NLPC celebrated with a headline decrying the “Phoney-Baloney” pact; mocking the idea of a circular economy; and expressing optimism about getting Walmart and other corporations to abandon their remaining environmental goals. (Walmart’s annual meeting is this Thursday, June 5).

So while it’s true that Walmart hasn’t completely thrown in the green towel, that may not remain true for long—and certainly won’t if the company feels more threatened by climate deniers than justice-minded consumers. Another targeted boycott of Walmart specifically for its environmental rollbacks probably wouldn’t solve that problem on it own, and it may not be possible for those without significant financial privilege. But it may change the way Walmart calculates its vulnerability. At the very least, it’d save some plastic from washing out to sea.

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Other stories I’m following:

• Walmart isn’t the only major plastic polluter to leave the U.S. Plastics Pact.

  Mondelēz, Mars, Nestlé and L’Oréal USA are also among the previous members that appear to have recently stepped away from the group, per an archived version of USPP’s website. Those companies did not comment. Multiple nonprofits, such as the Ocean Conservancy and the National Stewardship Action Council, also appear to have exited the pact.

• Youth climate activists sue Trump over executive orders

  Young people who sued state governments over climate change have begun a legal challenge aimed at President Trump’s spate of executive orders on climate and the environment. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Montana, argues that three of the executive orders are unconstitutional and would cripple the clean energy industry, suppress climate science and worsen global warming.

• Oil companies face a wrongful death suit tied to climate change

  A lawsuit filed in a Washington state court claims oil companies are responsible for the death of a woman in Seattle during a record-breaking heat wave several years ago. The case marks the first time oil companies have been sued over the death of a person in a "climate disaster," according to the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group.

• Floods kill at least 111 as northern Nigeria battles climate change

  Torrents of predawn rain unleashed flooding that killed at least 111 people in a market town where northern Nigerian farmers sell their wares to traders from the south, officials said Friday, predicting the death toll would grow. … Communities in northern Nigeria have been experiencing prolonged dry spells worsened by climate change and excessive rainfall that leads to severe flooding during the brief wet season.

• Mayors are making climate action personal. It’s working.

  As American cities have grown in size and population and gotten hotter, they — not the federal government — have become crucibles for climate action: Cities are electrifying their public transportation, forcing builders to make structures more energy efficient, and encouraging rooftop solar. Together with ambitious state governments, hundreds of cities large and small are pursuing climate action plans — documents that lay out how they will reduce emissions and adapt to extreme weather — with or without support from the feds.

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