Sustainability index

Walmart has worked with more than 100 suppliers, several leading NGOs and the scientists at The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) for the past several years to build the Sustainability Index. It’s a tool that gathers and analyzes information about a supplier’s approach to monitoring and managing social and environmental impact across the product life cycle — from sourcing, manufacturing and transporting to selling, customer usage and recycling.

We’re putting this tool into the hands of our buyers and suppliers in the U.S., and piloting it in Chile and Mexico to drive continuous improvement and identify hot spots for special initiatives, such as factory energy efficiency and fertilizer optimization. For the first time, we're making information from the Index available to the public in the Sustainability Leaders shop at Walmart.com. The site describes the major hot spots affecting more than 80 product categories and showcases suppliers who score the highest on the Index in each category. The Sustainability Leaders badge does not make any representations about the environmental or social impact of an individual product. It means that a manufacturer is an industry leader in sustainability efforts in a product category.