Jewelry

Love, Earth jewelry line

As the world’s largest jewelry retailer, Walmart can have a significant, positive impact on the way jewelry goes from mine to market, including refining, polishing and cutting, and all the way through to manufacturing.

Around the globe we are working with our suppliers to develop sustainable solutions to product packaging. We developed an online packaging scorecard to gather information on suppliers’ product packaging and help our buyers make more informed purchasing decisions.

Goals

• Achieve 10 percent traceability of all diamonds, gold and silver in jewelry sold in Walmart U.S. from mines, refineries and manufacturers, meeting ethical sourcing standards and responsible mining criteria by 2010.
  • Update: To date, we have been successful in tracing 15.2 percent of our gold, but tracking has proven to be much more of a challenge in the areas of diamonds and silver. Mining sources alone are too limiting. Walmart continues to look for stronger tracking methods of metals and minerals and is closely monitoring developing regulations in this area.
• All jewelry packaging in the U.S. will be made more sustainable, and we will convert all jewelry pallets and boxes to recycled materials by 2010.
  • In 2008, we decided to eliminate the majority of jewelry pallets, and to date we have eliminated 91 percent. The remaining 9 percent of our pallets are made from recycled materials, and we are in the process of doing so. Additionally, the boxes can be recycled once customers take their jewelry products home.

Objectives and Actions

• As a member of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, we are identifying a diamond mine, a gold mine, a manufacturer, and working with a third-party verification company to produce new products in environmentally and socially conscious ways and to test more transparent supply chain practices.

Traceability:

• We are working to make our supply chain practices for jewelry more transparent.
  • We introduced our “Love, Earth ” jewelry line, which features 100 percent traceable gold and silver jewelry. This jewelry line:
    • is available at all Walmart stores, Sam’s Club locations and at www.walmart.com.
    • is the first time a major retailer has set standards for third-tier suppliers (mining industry) and established a line of jewelry that has 100 percent “traceability” – the ability to track the products from mining and refining to manufacturing and distribution.
  • We expanded the line to include 100 percent traceable diamonds available in 500 Walmart stores across the U.S.

Packaging:

• We have revised our goal to focus on improving the score jewelry packaging receives in our packaging scorecard. Since we outlined our original goal, we have learned more about jewelry packaging options and have decided that committing to use only biodegradable bags is not the best way to move our sustainability efforts forward because of concerns from our environmental partners about biodegradability. Therefore, in addition to focusing on packaging scores, we:
  
  • remain committed to converting all boxes to recycled materials by 2010, and already at Sam’s Club, 100 percent of jewelry gift boxes are made from recycled materials.

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