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Walmart aids Chinese businesses in sustainability efforts

The Walmart Foundation announced an $875,000 grant to The Sustainability Consortium to expand its efforts to support Chinese businesses.

May 11, 2015

The Walmart Foundation is giving a $875,000 grant to The Sustainability Consortium to expand its recent efforts to support Chinese businesses in identifying and capturing sustainability improvement opportunities in Chinese product supply chains. This will be achieved by conducting sustainability research in footwear and large appliances and building capacity of Consortium partners and related institutions to further TSC objectives, according to a Walmart release.

"At Walmart, sustainability requires collaboration with NGOs, government agencies, suppliers and many other partners, spanning all the major areas of its supply chain, including suppliers, logistics, store operations and customers," Guy Robertson, vice president of global sourcing for Walmart, said in a statement. "Over the past year, more than 100 of our largest direct suppliers in China are actively using the sustainability index developed by TSC to evaluate their product sustainability; these efforts reinforce our commitment to help the People of China live better."

With a $2 million USD grant from the Walmart Foundation in 2012, TSC began operations in China and started helping Chinese businesses to identify and capture sustainability improvement opportunities in Chinese supply chains. With China's sizeable impact on global trade systems there is tremendous benefit to be gained if stakeholder groups understand, help build, and adopt a globally-harmonized method of researching, measuring, and communicating sustainability standards and good practices across the full lifecycle of products, according to the Walmart release.

"The Sustainability Consortium mission is to create more sustainable consumer products across sectors and throughout entire product lifecycles," Sheila Bonini, CEO of TSC, said in a statement. "A significant amount of consumer goods impact is in the supply chain, and China is central to the global consumer product supply chain. This grant will enable TSC to further our mission and expand the impact of our work in China, which will have meaningful global implications."

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