Merced Stop Wal-Mart Action Team

Yesterday, the Barstow City Council approved plans for a new Wal-Mart distribution center dedicated solely to food distribution.The warehouse, located approximately 45 minutes from Wal-Mart's Apple Valley distribution center, will contain over 520,000 square feet in refrigerated storage. 

 According to the project's Environmental Impact Report, diesel trucks using the warehouse will generate a shocking amount of toxic air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. 

 From the air quality chapter in the Barstow EIR:

• In total, every year the distribution center's diesel trucks will generate over 550 tons of Nitrogen Oxide (NOx), including over 350 tons of NOx dumped into the Mojave Desert Air Basin. NOx forms ground-level ozone and fine particulate, which trigger asthma attacks and cause heart, lung and brain damage and premature death. 
• The Barstow distribution center's diesel trucks will generate 556 tons of particulate every year, including 310 tons per year into the Mojave Desert Air Basin. The California Air Resources Board recently found that exposure to particulate (soot) causes nearly 3,000 Valley residents to die prematurely every year.

While Wal-Mart has talked about 'going green,' its global CO2 footprint increased 9% according to its 2007 'sustainability' report. As author Stacy Mitchell writes,

And all of these issues—over-sized stores, long-distance transportation—are fundamental to the company's business model. The best case scenario for Wal-Mart's sustainability initiative is to make a highly polluting operation somewhat less so.

But the best case scenario is not what Wal-Mart hopes to achieve. Like everything the company does, its eco-initiatives are designed to facilitate one overriding goal: growth. Improving its image and enlisting the support of prominent environmental groups are key to its expansion strategy. Since Wal-Mart announced its sustainability initiative two years ago, the company has built 285 new stores in the United States and almost 1,000 new stores in other countries. By its own narrow measure, Wal-Mart's CO2 emissions have gone up 9 percent.

•  Diesel truck trips generated by the Barstow distribution center will dump 97,214 tons of the greenhouse gas CO2 into our atmosphere, according to the EIR.