By Nichola Groom
"Bad quality products create waste, and so having tighter standards on the social side, on the environmental side and on the quality side will reduce waste," Matt Kistler, Wal-Mart's senior vice president of sustainability, said in an interview.
But that does not have to mean higher prices for customers.
"We are looking at a very small amount of dollars and the savings in the supply chain that we are finding because of sustainability in some cases will more than offset the incremental costs of what we are paying for a better quality item."
As part of that effort, the company has pushed its suppliers to cut back on the amount of packaging they use by 5 percent by 2013.
Wal-Mart's suppliers had a February 1 deadline to comply with the "packaging scorecard" initiative, but many of the company's smaller vendors -- which represent roughly 20 percent of the goods the company buys -- have yet to do so, Kistler said.
But Kistler added the scorecard had already produced a lot of change in the packages of its most popular products.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Andre Grenon)
