Can Anyone, Even Walmart, Stem The Heat-Trapping Flood Of Nitrogen On Farms?

The Environmental Defense Fund opened an office near Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., 10 years ago. It was part of a carefully plotted strategy to persuade the giant retailer that going green could be good for business. If it worked, it certainly could be good for the planet — Walmart's revenues are bigger than the entire economy of most countries."We really saw that working with companies could be transformative at a scale that was pretty unmatched," says Suzy Friedman, a senior director at EDF.If you're looking for evidence that the strategy is working, there's this: Last year, Walmart unveiled Project Gigaton, a plan to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by a billion tons of carbon between now and 2030. That's almost as much carbon as what's released from the country's entire fleet of passenger cars and trucks in a year. The cuts will come from the company's suppliers: the vast galaxy of companies that make the products it sells.Even before unveiling that pledge, Walmart had been calculating the climate price tags of those products, estimating the greenhouse gases that are released in the process of making each one. Laura Phillips, Walmart's senior vice president for sustainability, was startled to see the climate price of simple food items, like baked goods, that don't seem like they'd require burning a lot of fossil fuels.