I wanted to take a second to let you know a little good news for Wal-Mart and for the planet.  Its official, as of today, Wal-Mart’s goal to work with laundry detergent suppliers to shrink the packaging of every liquid laundry detergent product on the shelf is completed.  Water has been pulled out of the bottles, and now all of the laundry detergents are compacted by a factor of 2 or 3. 

I love this kind of small change with a big impact for two reasons.  First, this change is so practical.  Though it has been literally years in the making, it is just at first blush a little occurrence until you think about the effort and the impact of a change to all of the detergent bottles that are sold at Wal-Mart shelves across the country.  Small unassuming changes seem to frequently end up being the most revolutionary don’t they…

Second, these changes are great b/c they end up being about more than just Wal-Mart.  Because this was done in partnership with the suppliers of detergent focused on efficiency across the entire supply chain, the impact will be seen at the rest of the retail over time too.  Soon, every bottle of laundry detergent will be compacted in every store.  This makes the effect even larger.  My very rough un-audited calculation for the total impact across all retail is that this will reduce 125 million pounds of plastic and 165 million pounds of cardboard each year. 

So, this kind of change reaches all customers regardless of where they shop; that means greater impact and more lasting change.  Indeed, with all of its sustainability efforts, Wal-Mart has committed to sharing learnings and even technologies.  A bummer is that this means Wal-Mart’s people may not get credit for their hard work…then again, the customer really deserves the credit anyway.