For years, WalMart has made greens toward a more sustainable business model. Now they're forcing others to do so, too.

Here’s the context: Over the past five years the retail giant has taken big, splashy steps to save energy, reduce waste, and sell cleaner products, like compact-fluorescent light bulbs. It’s given less focus to the impact of the factories that churn all over the world to keep the chain’s shelves and display cases full. Today’s announcement—a goal to cut 20 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions by the end 2015—focuses on those factories.

Read the rest of this Grist.org article, by Jonathan Hiskes, here.

Of course, not everyone buys the hype: