Can Coles and Woolies be more sustainable?
Posted: March 2, 2011 Filed under: Energy & GHG, Miscellaneous | Tags: Andrew Winston, Coles, department store, food bank, food miles, Harvard Business Review, Lisbon, supermarket, sustainability, The Huffington Post, Wal-Mart, Woolworths 3 Comments
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Giant US department store chain Wal-Mart has some interesting initatives to promote sustainability and public health that the likes of Coles, Woolworths and Bunnings should be taking note of.
My interest in Wal-Mart was piqued by a large number of hits The Melbourne Urbanist received last month from the US on a piece I wrote about the value of ‘food miles’. The hits were generated by an article published in The Huffington Post and the Harvard Business Review.
Written by Andrew Winston, the article looked at Wal-Mart’s efforts to green its supply chain and linked to the analysis of whether or not ‘local food’ is more sustainable that I posted here back in July.
Andrew Winston says there are three initiatives in particular that demonstrate Wal-Mart’s strategic focus on sustainability.
First, it’s doubling the quantity of locally sourced food on its shelves; second, it’s reducing the amount of saturated fat, sugar and salt in its house brand products; and third, its donating $2 million to 16 food banks to help them lower their energy costs (food banks are non profits that distribute surplus food to the hungry).
I doubt there’s any sustainability dividend from buying locally (the point of my earlier piece on ‘food miles’), but apparently Wal-Mart believes it will lower supply costs. It should also help the company create a friendlier image with local communities.
The second initiative is the key one. It could potentially provide a better public health outcome for customers as well as reduce the environmental impact associated with complex inputs like saturated fat and sugar. It should improve Wal-Mart’s standing on health and environmental issues and thereby give it a continuing commercial incentive to keep up the good work. Read the rest of this entry »
Do school league tables add any value?
Posted: March 1, 2011 Filed under: Education, justice, health | Tags: Alex Tabarrok, league table, Malcolm Gladwell, My School, Pierre Koning, school accountability, Simon Burgess, The Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis Leave a comment
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Some new research suggests they do!
One of the arguments against My School is that information on the performance of different schools will be interpreted incorrectly by the press, the public and parents.
The concerns usually relate to fears that schools will ‘teach to the test’; high socioeconomic status parents will abandon under-performing schools; or due regard will not be given to the special conditions that apply to some schools.
While I acknowledge there are risks with performance data, I’m suspicious of anyone who tells me that parents can’t be trusted – supposedly for both their own good and the good of their children – with full information about their child’s school.
I’ve written about My School before in the context of the ICSEA Index (here and here). With the revised My School web site going live on Friday, it’s timely to look at some recently published research on school league tables in Wales and The Netherlands (H/T Alex Tabarrok).
The research on Wales takes advantage of a ‘natural experiment’ – secondary school performance tables that have been published in both England and Wales since 1992 were abolished in Wales in 2001 but maintained in England. The research examines the effects over the subsequent years in both jurisdictions.
The University of Bristol researchers found there is “systematic, significant and robust evidence that abolishing school league tables markedly reduced school effectiveness in Wales”. They estimate the negative impact on schools is equivalent to increasing class size from 30 pupils to 38.
They also find that the negative effect is “concentrated in the schools in the lower 75% of the distribution of ability and poverty” and argue that the “results show that the policy reform in Wales reduced average performance and raised educational inequality”. Read the rest of this entry »
The Melbourne Urbanist 