Photo by: David Lorish
Representatives from both PepsiCo and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. spoke at DU last week about how they are embracing sustainable practices while reducing costs at the same time.
Tim Carey, PepsiCo. director of sustainability and technology, spoke of the company’s sustainability vision.
“Let’s make tomorrow greater than today,” said Carey, which is PepsiCo’s main sustainability slogan. “It is not just about making money; we also have a social responsibility. We have to give back to the people, regardless of whether or not they buy our product.”
According to Carey, PepsiCo is a public trading company with over $35 billion in revenue and products available in almost 200 countries. It employs more than 185,000 people.
Pepsi created a program called Performance with Purpose to help sustain the environment while continuing profit and growth. The performance side includes maintaining consistent and sustained profitable growth, while the purpose side contains three goals: environmental sustainability in conserving natural resources, human knowledge of issues and talent. The attraction of this program is that it hires and rewards the best and brightest.
“It has been a losing game since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,” said Carey of trying to create products and buildings without harming the environment.
“Our new buildings will be more efficient by using LEED standards. We have four LEED certified buildings right now and we just started doing this a few years back.”
The LEED standard is a design strategy that assesses the energy-efficiency of a structure.
PepsiCo has many goals and a target set for reduction of energy, water, resources and more for the year 2015 and has won the Energy Star Partner of the Year Award three times in a row.
“I assure you if competitors see a reward for going green, they will change,” said Carey of what we can do to help make more companies decide to join the sustainability movement.
Janelle Kearsley, director of corporate strategy/sustainability for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., spoke next about Wal-Mart’s accomplishments and goals in going green.
Wal-Mart is one of the world’s largest retail companies with more than 100 million customers a week on average and $345 billion in sales last year, said Kearsley. According to Kearsley, one of the company’s goals is to integrate sustainability thinking into everything the employees do.
“Three years ago, Wal-Mart was looking at what we needed to do to be more pro-active and that is when we started sustainability,” said Kearsley. The company created its 21st Century Leadership/Goals Plan in 2005.
The plan, said Kearsley, proposed that Wal-Mart’s energy supply would be 100 percent renewable. Another goal was to create zero waste and to sell products that sustain resources and the environment.
In 2008, Wal-Mart created Company of the Future goals which include a more energy efficient future, a supply chain of the future and more affordable health care through efficiency.
“It is really about how to work with suppliers and retailers overseas to find one way to come together,” said Kearsley of what the Company of the Future needs in order to be successful.
An example of one of the changes Wal-Mart has made in order to reduce energy use is its Aurora, Colo., experimental store which has the lights go on or off based on the amount of daylight and the amount of light coming through the ceiling windows.
Sophomore HRTM major Mark Turlo enjoyed the event, which was hosted by Net Impact, an environmental group based out of the Daniels College of Business.
An employee of the Hyatt Regency downtown, Turlo said he “wanted to see how other companies who are already sustainable did it,” since the Hyatt is currently working to improve its green practices.
