Sustainable Buildings
We continue to integrate innovative ways to make our stores, Sam’s Club and all other facilities more energy efficient, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, conserve water and increase the use of recycled materials that reduce our use of virgin materials. Goals - Design and open a viable store prototype that is 25-30 percent more energy efficient and will produce up to 30 percent fewer GHG emissions by 2009 globally (2005 Baseline).
- Reduce greenhouse gases at our existing store, club and distribution center base around the world by 20 percent by 2012 (2005 Baseline).
Objectives and Actions We can not meet these aggressive goals on yesterday’s technologies. Walmart uses our size to test and pilot promising technologies, and then deploy the technologies that make economic and environmental sense to all new stores built, through a three-phase new technology deployment process: Experiment: - Experimental Stores – Located in McKinney, Texas, and Aurora, Colorado, these stores served as living laboratories for energy-efficient technologies, new building materials and new landscaping methods that we can potentially incorporate into our store prototypes.
- Technologies being tested include solar and wind power generation, and some—like LED lighting in outdoor signage, refrigerator cases and jewelry displays—are already making their way into stores across the country, both at Walmart stores and our competitors’ stores.
Pilot: - High Efficiency (HE) Store Series -- we have “high efficiency” pilot stores across the country where promising technologies from our experimental stores can be further tested in a range of geographic and climatic settings, allowing customers and associates to test them before being added to our prototype.
- Read more about our HE.1 stores: Kansas City, Missouri, Rockton, Illinois, and Highland Village, Texas.
- Read more about our HE.2 stores: Romeoville, Illinois, Wichita, Kansas, Garland, Texas, and Bernalillo, New Mexico.
- Read more about our HE.3 stores: Sanford, Maine, Youngstown, Ohio.
- Read more about our HE.5 store: Las Vegas, Nevada.
- Read more about our HE.6 store: Sacramento, California.
Deploy: - Baseline model – We will retrofit 500 buildings this year in the United States with energy efficient technologies, and we’re implementing game changing innovations in all of our newly constructed buildings. A few of the dozens of technologies include:
- Daylight Harvesting: Comprised of hundreds of skylights per store connected to sensors and state-of-the-art control technology. Daylight harvesting can reduce up to 75 percent of the electric lighting energy used in a supercenter during daylight hours.
- Energy Management System: Walmart utilizes a centralized energy management system (EMS) to monitor and control the heating, air conditioning, refrigeration and lighting systems for all U.S. stores and Sam’s Club locations from Walmart’s Home Office in Bentonville, Arkansas.
- Light Emitting Diodes: Walmart uses light emitting diodes (LEDs) in exterior building signage and many refrigerated food cases. In 2007, LEDs in freezer cases became standard for all newly constructed Walmart stores and Sam's Club locations. LED technology can provide a 52 percent more energy efficient operation than fluorescent illumination.
- Roofs: Walmart uses “white” membrane roofs on its newly constructed stores and Sam’s Club locations. With a higher reflectivity and emissivity, white roofs help reduce building energy consumption in most climate zones and have a lower heat island effect than a darker roofing color.
- Water: Walmart uses advanced water- and energy-saving technologies in our restrooms. The restroom sinks in newly constructed Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations use sensor-activated 1/2 gallon per minute high efficiency faucets.
- Floors: All newly constructed stores and Sam’s Club facilities must either replace 15 to 20 percent of their flooring cement with fly ash, a waste product of coal-fired electrical generation, or replace 25 to 30 percent of their cement with slag, a waste product of steel manufacturing, which can help offset the greenhouse gas emissions emitted in the cement manufacturing process. These floors also eliminate the need for chemical cleaners.
- Low Chemical Materials: We have reduced the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of exterior and interior field paint coatings by approximately 40 percent by using better performing standard paint products with lower VOC content limits.
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