This week the world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart has begun a new era of corporate responsibility by announcing a five-year program to begin tracking the environmental and social responsibility of all items on their shelves. The company is developing an electronic indexing system that will allow consumers to make product choices based on those that do the least harm to the environment and to citizens in the often poorer countries that produce them.
Wal-Mart has started the process by asking its more than 100,000 suppliers to answer 15 questions about their business practices, with a deadline of October to respond. The wealth of data that it collects will then be built upon to develop an index that consumers can quickly scan in stores, similar to the nutrition labeling that is now mandated.
This new indexing and monitoring system will be a boon for geospatial analysis, with need to model both the carbon footprint of individual factories as well as the overall carbon output of entire supply chains.
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