Transportation

Walmart Joins Amazon With Massive Sustainability Pledge


Don’t tell a certain segment of the political population, but large American companies across the political spectrum are doing something serious about climate change. Both Amazon
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and Walmart
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recently announced big plans to green up their operations, including (most importantly, for us here at the Transportation desk) their truck and vehicle fleets.

Let’s start with Walmart, which updated its renewable energy strategy this week as part of Climate Week NYC. The idea, wrote Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon, is to go “beyond sustainability as it is understood and practiced today.” What does that mean? Well, instead of throwing a few solar panels on some of their mega-stores and calling it a day, Walmart says it will use only renewable electricity by 2035 and that its entire global operations will be zero-emission by 2040. McMillon says the company will “electrify” its vehicles, including long-haul trucks, by 2040.

Zach Freeze, Walmart’s senior director of sustainability, told me that the company’s pledge is a global one and it will affect vehicles of all kinds. Walmart owns and operates 6,500 semi tractors in the U.S., its largest fleet, but Canada is going to get to zero-emission trucks first, setting a 2028 target for their transition. Similar things are happening in China and in India where, “one of the entities that we own, Flipcart, announced recently that they’re going to be using 100 percent electric vehicles by 2030, some of them being electric motorcycles,” Freeze said.

Back in 2014, Walmart showed off a concept hybrid tractor-trailer combination called the Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience (pictured above). Designed in partnership with Peterbilt, the WAVE was more aerodynamic than the Peterbilt Model 386 semi truck – by 20 percent – that the company was using at the time. The WAVE had a microturbine-powered range-extender developed by Capstone Turbine Corporation
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. Walmart still touts the WAVE on its corporate website, but there’s no word on whether you will ever see it carrying good on the highway. Even so, the company is committed to making changes.

“The science is clear and consistent,” McMillon said in a statement. “Fossil fuel combustion is the primary cause of warming, and the world must be more aggressive in moving toward renewable forms of energy. More than that, though, to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the world must reduce, avoid and remove greenhouse gas emissions. No longer is it enough to ‘slow down’ climate change and protect what we have left. Society must bend the curve on emissions and restore nature.”

Freeze said that it’s not just the powertrains in its vehicles that will evolve in the coming decades, and ways of getting goods to customers will get updates, too. He said Walmart is looking at drones as well as working with partners to update the infrastructure needed to get to zero emissions. “By 2040, these methods of transportation may change,” he said. “It’s hard to say everything is going to look like it does today.”

Speaking of drones, over at Amazon, the online sales monster said in June that it would also work towards a net zero carbon operation by 2040. The company’s goal to use 100 percent renewable energy is shorter than Walmart’s, with a 2025 deadline. Amazon said it already has “91 renewable energy projects, including 31 utility-scale wind and solar projects and 60 solar rooftops on fulfillment centers and sort centers around the globe,” which produce more than 7.6 million MWh of renewable energy each year. That’s an amount large enough to power 680,000 U.S. homes, and Amazon says it will continue to build out that capacity and then also use it in a fleet of 100,000 electric vehicles from Rivian, which are supposed to start service some time in 2021.



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