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Shopping is about to become a little more complicated. There's an extra dilemma to consider in buying a new tee shirt in a superstore. There's the price, the colour, the style, the fabric, the fitting. Oh, and now there's the garment's sustainability value and carbon footprint.

With great fanfare, the world's biggest retailer, Walmart, recently declared that it was setting up a sustainability index to evaluate the goings-on at its 100,000 suppliers around the world who manufacture everything from tee shirts to shotguns, flat screen televisions and groceries.

The sprawling Arkansas-based mega-company, which owns 7,900 shops in 15 countries including Britain's Asda supermarkets, ultimately intends to attach a rating label on everything it sells, providing customers with an ethical and environmental score.

Although the most ambitious to date, Walmart's initiative is far from isolated. The sportswear company Nike already has a 'considered index' breaking down the waste footprint of each of its clothes and trainers. The fast food megalith McDonald's has a performance index for its suppliers and in Britain, Tesco has been working for two years towards attaching a carbon footprint label to everything in its stores.

A welcome approach

Environmentalists generally cheer such moves. Andre de Fontaine, a specialist in business strategy at the US Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, says: 'For companies like Walmart, a lot of the environmental impact of what they do resides upstream, from the supplier base. These indexes are a way of judging the overall impact of products, all the way from origination through the production process until they get into the store.'

All well and good. But de Fontaine warns that it will be a 'real challenge' to pull off successfully, as much of the data to be culled from suppliers simply does not yet exist. Furthermore, presentation poses the trickiest of communication tests. 'What you don't want to do is get into a situation where you're overloading the consumer with information because if the consumer can't make sense of it, it's no use at all,' he says.

For Walmart, the first step is relatively straightforward. The company is dispatching a list of 15 questions to all of its suppliers. Some are direct. For example: 'Have you measured your corporate greenhouse gas emissions?' Others are more technical, along the lines of 'do you have a process for managing social compliance at the manufacturing level?' and 'have you set publicly available water use reduction targets?'.

Top-tier American-based suppliers were given until 1 October to answer. Others will be given timelines on a country-by-country basis. Processing and translating the information into ratings will take some years - but the ambition does not end there.

Walmart wants its benchmarking to become an open platform tool. It does not want to 'own' its own index. Chief executive Mike Duke told reporters in July: 'This is not a Walmart effort. Our desire is for this to be a global standard.'

The firm is helping to fund a collaboration of universities, businesses and not-for-profit organisations called the Sustainability Consortium, charged with developing a global database on the lifecycle of products, from raw materials to waste by-products and disposal.

This will encompass a broad definition of 'sustainability'. As well as environmental considerations, it extends to suppliers' community and charitable works, and to ethical treatment of employees - to avoid, for example, the use of sweatshops.

'It's a huge commitment,' says Conrad Mackerron, director of corporate social responsibility at San Francisco-based not-for-profit organisation As You Sow. 'No one knows exactly how long it will take or where it will all end to get this data together.'

Recruiting the help of several universities is a shrewd move by Walmart, which has historically had a poor reputation among unions and pressure groups, although there could still be distrust in certain quarters towards any ostensibly independent monitoring viewed as bankrolled by big business.

But just how such a broad universe of information can be crammed into a single rating, or a single label, is a matter of conjecture.

'You might end up with a label that's very good on environmental issues, with low toxic emissions and low carbon,' says Mackerron. 'But there could still be a big hole on the production side if something's produced in a factory where you're not sure if workers are being treated fairly and where people could be subjected to abusive rules.'

Business rationale

So why all the enthusiasm for a potentially costly, time-consuming process that might impact sales of lines designated a damaging rating? In pure profit terms, the business rationale is becoming increasingly broadly accepted - waste costs money. As Andrew Winston, author of the business bestseller Green to Gold put it, 'anything not in a product is considered a cost'. That includes garbage for disposal and emissions requiring a clean-up.

Beyond that, public and political opinions are pushing the corporate world.

The consultancy firm Deloitte found that 95 per cent of shoppers would 'buy green' if they had the right information. Despite waning consumer spending, the US marketplace for natural products grew by 25 per cent between 2006 and 2008.

'Sustainability is now widely accepted as a core business issue rather than a passing fad,' says Deloitte's enterprise sustainability specialist, Peter Capozucca. 'However, particularly in the light of the current economic downturn, many stakeholder groups are no longer satisfied with vague assertions that green is really 'gold'.'

Specifics needed

Increasingly environmentally savvy consumers want specifics. A study by BPM Forum, an advisory board for American businesses, found that two thirds of companies expect that customers will ask them to reveal their carbon footprint within the next year. The corporate world is grappling with how best to be transparent.

In Britain, Walkers crisps has opted for a straightforward approach. Working with the Carbon Trust, the snacks firm, which is owned by PepsiCo, established two years ago that the average carbon footprint of a bag of cheese and onion crisps, its best selling flavour, was 85 grammes. While this figure, in itself, may mean little to many crisp aficionados, consumers can easily grasp the extent of a change in the number.

Since 2007, Walkers has cut its transport emissions by switching to 100 per cent British potatoes. It shifted trucks onto biodiesel containing five per cent used cooking oil, trained drivers to drive in the most fuel efficient way, moved to low-energy lighting at factories and improved production line efficiencies and also reduced the weight of its packaging.

The result - a seven per cent drop to emissions of 80 grammes per packet, or a saving of more than 4,800 tonnes over two years (or roughly the weight of 580 elephants).

The reduction has saved Walkers more than £400,000 over the period, which has been re-invested in future energy saving projects.

Another Pepsi subsidiary, Tropicana, calculated that 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere for each half gallon bottle of orange juice - a good deal of it in the course of producing fertiliser to treat orange groves. Tropicana's North American president, Neil Campbell, told the New York Times earlier in the year that measurements are far from perfect but that 'you can end up doing nothing if you let that stop you'.

Long way to go

Claims and counter-claims can be confusing. The computer company Dell declared last year that it had met an internal target to become 'carbon neutral'. Dell's Texas headquarters is powered entirely by green energy. The firm has invested in wind power and has pumped money into forest preservation as far afield as Madagascar to offset its emissions.

But Dell's 'neutrality' does not extend down its supply chain - the power and transport costs involved in manufacturing its components do not count in the calculation. Greenpeace International pointed out that planting trees does not actually amount to cutting emissions and questioned whether the computer company's heady claims risked amounting to a 'greenwash'.

So without a generally agreed criteria for measuring sustainability, ethically conscious consumers still face a complicated and fuzzy choice.

Walmart's move towards an 'open platform' index, built with the participation of the expert community, appears a clever and well-intentioned move. Jon Johnson, a University of Arkansas expert involved in the project, described it as 'a unique opportunity to influence the creation of a tool that will improve the decision-making abilities of consumers around the world'.

It will never be as simple to label a product's ethical content as it is to attach a straightforward price tag. But executives working in the field of sustainability argue strongly that a blitz of information is better than keeping customers guessing.

When a critic at a London climate change conference suggested that Tesco's carbon labels could be confusing, the chain's director of corporate responsibility, David North, responded by quoting William Tyndale, the 15th century scholar who translated the Bible from Latin to English.

Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for heresy, said it could only serve the interests of the elite to 'keep the world still in darkness, to the intent they might sit in the consciences of the people'. 

Sustainability Product Index

The 15 questions that suppliers to Walmart are being asked

Energy and climate: reducing energy costs and greenhouse-gas emissions

1. Have you measured your corporate greenhouse-gas emissions?

2.  Have you opted to report your greenhouse-gas emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project?

3. What is your total annual greenhouse-gas emissions reported in the most recent year measured?

4.  Have you set publicly available greenhouse-gas reduction targets?

If yes, what are these targets?

Material efficiency: reducing waste and enhancing quality

5.  If measured, please report the total amount of solid waste generated from the facilities that produce your product(s) for Walmart for the most recent year measured.

6.  Have you set publicly available solid-waste reduction targets?

If yes, what are those targets?

7.  If measured, please report total water use from facilities that produce your product(s) for Walmart for the most recent year measured.

8.  Have you set publicly available water use reduction targets?

If yes, what are those targets?

Natural resources: producing high quality, responsibly sourced raw materials

9.  Have you established publicly available sustainability purchasing guidelines for your direct suppliers that address issues such as environmental compliance, employment practices and product/ingredient safety?

10.  Have you obtained third-party certifications for any of the products that you sell to Walmart?

People and community: ensuring responsible and ethical production

11.  Do you know the location of 100 per cent of the facilities that produce your product(s)?

12. Before beginning a business relationship with a manufacturing facility, do you evaluate the quality of, and capacity for, production?

13. Do you have a process for managing social compliance at the manufacturing level?

14. Do you work with your supply base to resolve issues found during social compliance evaluations, and also document specific corrections and improvements?

15.  Do you invest in community development activities in the markets you source from and/or operate within?

Source: Walmart

Walmart's C02 emissions per $1 million in sales

2008 - 53 tonnes

2007 - 55 tonnes

2006 - 58 tonnes

In the financial year ending 31 January 2009, annual sales at Walmart topped $400 billion. Thus, its annual C02 emissions equate to 21.2 million tonnes

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