Managing the disparate groups that make up the Sustainability Consortium is the job of Dr. Jay Golden of the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University and Dr. Jon Johnson of the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. As co-directors they will coordinate and track the work of scientists and engineers to come up with uniform, reliable methods to measure sustainability. “When Walmart first approached me about getting involved with their sustainability initiative several years ago, I came away impressed by their commitment,” recalls Golden, “but told them that there was no one institution that could handle putting together an index like this.”
Today, Golden says, people from about 50 entities are part of the consortium, including R&D and sustainability executives at manufacturers such as The Procter & Gamble Co. (PG), Unilever PLC (UL), Dell Inc., PepsiCo Inc. (PEP) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ). Researchers from Duke University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan; Stanford University; and the University of Cambridge in the U.K. are also on board. And because Walmart says it does not want to own the index, it has encouraged other retailers to get involved as well. At recent meetings in Washington, D.C., sustainability experts from Safeway Inc. (SWY), Overstock.com Inc., J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (JCP), and Marks and Spencer in the U.K. were also present, Golden says.
This last point is especially crucial, he adds. “[The Sustainability Index] can’t evolve into the ‘Walmart Index’ or it won’t work,” he explains. “For there to be credibility and uniformity in the measures, it has to be something that a supplier can use with many global retailers. Having multiple sustainability indices for different retailers will be too costly, impossible to manage and completely confusing for consumers.” Adds P&G Vice President of Global Sustainability Len Sauers: “It’s very important to have broad cross-industry participation in the development of this effort — that is, retailers and manufacturers.”