Walmart fell short on many of its environmental pledges for 2025, an outcome it foreshadowed in December 2024.
But the world’s largest retailer made demonstrable progress on its carbon footprint: It cut absolute emissions from operations (Scope 1) and electricity (Scope 2) by 7.5 percent to 14.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (mtCO2e) during the 2026 fiscal year ended Jan. 31 — a cumulative reduction of 24.6 percent since 2016. The total for its indirect emissions (Scope 3) rose about 3 percent to an estimated 635 million mtCO2e.
In addition, Walmart reduced its carbon intensity, which measures emissions as a percentage of sales, by another 11.6 percent for Scope 1 and 2. It has cut emissions intensity for Scope 1 and 2 by more than half since 2016. It also passed the halfway point for its pledge to add 10 gigawatts of new clean energy projects by 2030.
Future progress will remain “lumpy” because of business growth; global energy policy and limited clean electricity projects in certain markets; and the availability and cost of technologies for decarbonizing delivery fleets and refrigeration systems, Walmart said in its FY2026 ESG Report, published July 29, which includes final tallies for the retailer’s 2025 milestones.
“We’ve always said progress is not going to be linear at the aggregate level,” Kathleen McLaughlin, executive vice president and chief sustainability officer at Walmart, told Trellis.
New 2030 target
While Walmart no longer has an official corporate net-zero target, the company committed in 2020 to cut combined absolute emissions for Scope 1 and Scope 2 by 35 percent by 2025: It ultimately logged a 24.6 percent reduction, according to the report. “It wasn’t quite the goal we originally set but it was good progress,” McLaughlin said.
Walmart has replaced that pledge with a new, validated science-based pledge for Scope 1 and 2 — aiming for a 28 percent cut by its 2031 fiscal year, based on a 2025 baseline. Judging by last year’s progress, it is one-quarter of the way there.
One big factor is Walmart’s multiyear project to adopt refrigeration and heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment that uses refrigerants with a lower global warming potential (GWP).
On-site refrigerants accounted for almost 30 percent of Walmart’s Scope 1 inventory in 2025, but refrigerant emissions were down almost 21 percent because of upgrades — some projects have delivered 80 percent emissions reductions — and better maintenance. Walmart employs more than 600 technicians trained to handle low-GWP options.
“That’s been part of a broader system that’s helped us improve refrigeration emissions, including using AI and data-based tools to get at and predict maintenance requirements and sources of leaks,” McLaughlin said.
Project Gigaton insights
Walmart continues to report metrics for its decade-old initiative to convince suppliers to reduce, sequester or avoid more than 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, Project Gigaton. It reached that goal in 2024, but the retailer continues to catalogue the results, even though it doesn’t officially have a Scope 3 goal.
Cumulative emissions avoided, reduced or sequestered through Project Gigaton reached close to 1.4 billion metric tons in FY2026. The program covered more than 4,300 suppliers for the reporting period; they account for almost 80 percent of Walmart’s U.S. sales.
The biggest drivers of Project Gigaton’s progress in the past year were energy projects such as energy retrofits (almost 34 percent of total) and better food and materials waste management (31 percent of the total estimated impact).
Walmart is using Project Gigaton to encourage suppliers to support its corporate goal to help “sustainably manage,” protect and restore 50 million acres of land and 1 million square miles of ocean by 2030.
It has surpassed both goals, according to the report, by encouraging suppliers to embrace practices such as better forest, farming and fishing practices and to use regenerative production techniques certified by third-party organizations.
For example, more than 97 percent of Walmart’s South American beef suppliers have verified policies that discourage deforestation or forest conversions; 100 percent of the suppliers for Walmart’s private-label tea are certified as “sustainable.”
Waste and packaging misses
Walmart fell just shy of a goal to divert 90 percent of its operational waste by 2025 — everything from secondary packaging to shopping carts to unsold merchandise. It reached an overall diversion rate of 84 percent. Walmart hasn’t set a new waste goal.
The retailer also missed all of its 2025 packaging goals, which applied to private label products. For example, Walmart aimed to make all of its packages recyclable, reusable or industrially compostable by mid-decade; it hit 64.3 percent, mostly by offering additional recyclable options. And while the retailer hoped to cut virgin plastic content by 15 percent, it posted increases for the past three fiscal years.
“Progress across our packaging metrics continues to be influenced by trade-offs among product protection, food safety, cost, regulatory requirements, recycled material availability, evolving supplier portfolios and changes in packaging formats that are not yet recyclable at scale,” the company said.
