Consumer Law

Wal-Mart intends to announce the sustainability index at a meeting on Thursday, July 16, at its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to which hundreds of suppliers, academics, environmentalists, and government officials have been invited. There, the company will unveil a sustainability consortium led by the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University that will provide scientific research to support the effort. Faculty at Duke, Harvard, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Michigan have been involved in planning the index, but they haven't yet agreed to join the consortium, in part because some college administrators are skittish about working with Wal-Mart. Consumer-goods companies Procter & Gamble (PG), General Mills (GIS), Tyson (TSN), and Unilever (UN), among others, are partners in the consortium. And competing retailers including Costco (COST), Target (TGT), and Kroger (KR) have been invited to join. This is, in other words, a very big deal.