By Jennifer Kho

Wal-Mart Stores on Friday unveiled a company-wide plan to go green under a new program called Sustainability 360.

At a lecture in London, CEO Lee Scott said Wal-Mart wants to remove non-renewable energy from the products it sells. The program includes previously announced initiatives, such as more energy-efficient lighting (see Could California Ban the Bulb?), and also targets reducing food packaging by 25 percent by 2008, and reducing all packaging by 5 percent by 2013.

This comes a day after the company announced plans to install solar panels and wind mills at some stores, and told The Dallas Morning News it has created its own electricity company, called Texas Retail Energy, to power its stores and is considering selling electricity to Texas consumers.

That’s conventional electricity for now, but if Wal-Mart does start selling retail electricity, it might one day become a clean-energy distributor. That’s because Wal-Mart is reviewing bids for solar-power systems for some of its stores now (Joel Makower, a principal at research firm Clean Edge, says the solar bid winner is expected to be notified February 28), and set a goal of eventually reaching 100 percent renewable energy for its stores.

Even if that never happens, it’s clear that Wal-Mart’s green efforts could have an impact on clean technology.

“Everything about Wal-Mart is about scale,” said Ron Pernick, a principal with Clean Edge. “Wal-Mart decides it’s going to sell [compact fluorescent lights], and in one fell swoop could sell more CFLs than anyone combined. That’s the magnitude of their size. Any decision they make can be felt just because of their sheer size.”

Mr. Pernick compared Sustainability 360 with General Electric’s Ecomagination and BP’s Beyond Petroleum campaigns. “It can make a lot of sense for a company to brand its efforts,” he said.

While Wal-Mart has already discussed many of its green initiatives in the last year, the announcement is significant because Wal-Mart—which previously set a goal of selling 100 million CFL bulbs—has now said it wants to sell more of these energy-efficient light bulbs than regular light bulbs by 2008, he said.

“Wal-Mart also is doing something interesting by saying, ‘Hey wait, we have to think about the renewable and fossil-fuel energy content of the product you use,’” he said. “It’s not just about turning on your socket; there’s energy content in everything that you do. Obviously in transportation, and also embodied within products and services.”

Aside from the electricity used to create products and their packaging, and the shipping or transportation of the products, plastics and some other materials are made of so-called petrochemicals, which use petroleum in the manufacturing.

The hope is that Wal-Mart’s initiatives will push manufacturers to change their products and operations for all their customers, not just for Wal-Mart, he said.

“One thing Wal-Mart has done better than just about anyone else, love or hate them for it, is to get suppliers to deliver to their specs, whether it’s reducing costs, streamlining processes, or any number of things,” Mr. Pernick said. “Now they’re saying they’re going to take that same influence and apply it to the environment.”