Grist reports that Wal-Mart will now consider how well its beer suppliers are addressing global warming.
A little over a year ago, Wal-Mart (finally) realized how much money they waste on things that are not products, i.e. fuel, electricity, packaging, etc. So, during the past year or so they’ve made Wal-Mart-sized changes that cut costs for their “always low price” products by forcing their suppliers to be more efficient. They package this as an environmental effort. In reality, it is efficiency pure and simple. Efficiency is the same thing whether you call it environmental efficiency or view it as simply getting more from less and thereby lowering prices so you can sell more.
In any case, they’ve now adopted an additional measure of efficiency: looking to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) to identify how efficient their beer suppliers are at using energy without producing emissions.
The CDP is basically a questionairre that is publicly shared. Some brewers have participated. Here are their responses:
- Anheuser-Busch
- SABMiller
- Molson Coors
- Diageo (owners of Guiness, among many other brands)
Notably, InBev failed to respond. Last time I checked I think InBev was the world’s largest brewer by sales (whereas A-B was largest by volume) – I think. Among InBev’s many brands: Stella Artois, Beck’s, Leffe, Hoegarden, and dozens of others.
Unfortunately, the CDP doesn’t seem to have any quick way of comparing the climate performance of companies against each other. But Climate Counts, who I blogged about here, provides a handy scorecard ranking three of the major brewers. SABMiller came out on top, followed by A-B and Molson Coors.
I thought that A-B was the third largest brewer, after InBev and SAB?
Stonch: I think it depends on whether you’re talking about volume or sales.
Chris