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Canada: Wal-Mart Canada has announced that it will partly decide the products it stocks based on whether suppliers have made sufficient effort to reduce packaging. The policy will put pressure on food manufacturers to ensure their packaging meets the requirements or else face being cut out of the Wal-Mart supply chain. Wal-Mart's goal is to reduce packaging on its products by five percent by 2013.

Mario Pilozzi, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart Canada, says suppliers to Wal-Mart will be required to complete a survey that aims to determine the environmental footprint as well as recycled content of packaging, with those failing to show progress losing shelf space in supermarkets.

Wal-Mart will soon be implementing a "packaging scorecard" which will evaluate Wal-Mart and Sam's Club suppliers on the sustainability of their packaging and offers suggestions for improvement. The scorecard evaluates the sustainability of product packaging based on a number of factors such as greenhouse gas emissions related to production, material value, product to packaging ratio, cube utilization, recycled content usage, innovation, the amount of renewable energy used to manufacture the packaging, the recovery value of the raw materials and emissions related to transportation of the packaging materials.

The criteria allow suppliers to determine how their packaging innovations, environmental standards, energy efficiencies and use of materials compare to others in the same product category areas. Suppliers will receive a score per package relative to their peers in each category. The creation of the packaging rating system is a significant part of the bid by the retailer to become more environmentally-friendly and meet the demands of its customers.

Guy McGuffin, vice-president Wal-Mart Canada, said the goal is not to eliminate packaging, but to reduce it without compromising the safety and integrity of the products it contains. "Even small changes can have an immense impact, not just for the environment, but for our business," he says. "When we use less packaging, we spend less on materials, ship less weight and require less space in our stores. At the same time, fewer trees are cut, less energy-intensive production occurs, and less waste is produced. There's great alignment between environmental and business sustainability."