Rand Waddoups is senior director of Business Strategy and Sustainability for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Almost four years ago, Wal-Mart announced three major goals that have since driven the company's operations internally and externally. Today, Rand gives us an insider's update on Wal-Mart's efforts toward sustainability, it's progress and next big challenges.

Leslie Guevarra: Rand, thank you very much for being with us today.

Rand Waddoups: Thanks for having me.

LG: We appreciate your coming to speak with us about Wal-Mart. The firm did something radical in 2005 -- it set some unprecedented goals: It set a target for having 100 percent renewables, for absolutely zero waste and to put products on the shelves that sustain the environment ...

RW: I'll tell you ever since that speech in October of 2005 when our CEO laid out a foundation for what our big goals would be, it's been amazing to watch this company progress.

It's been amazing to see that Wal-Mart is very good at eliminating waste naturally, and so I'll start out with that waste goal. We've made a lot of progress with regard to first measuring how much waste was actually being in our stores, and I'll tell you, we were a little surprised at how much value there was in our trash cans. And so from that angle we've spent quite a bit of our time over the last couple of years since 2005 really understanding what was going in our trash can back then, how we could develop some value out of that, and therefore, obviously, when you can get value out of your trash, diverting those waste streams and turning them into new things is really exciting.

We've done things like take some of our old plastic products that are brought back to our stores as either damaged or in some way returned, and when those get broken down into plastics, we're now shipping them off to Bissell, and they're now turning them into vacuum cleaners. We've discovered that there are a lot of plastics in our trash that most people would just throw away and put it landfills, but we've actually managed to turn them into other new kinds of products like stepping stools. There's actually a company in Texas we're working with to take some things like our old oil bottles, and oil bottles are difficult to use because they're coated with oil on the inside --

LG: (Laughter) Exactly.

RW: -- but we're making railroad ties out of these now. It's just been really fun to take a look at all of the things that you just think of as "of course that goes in the trash can" and figuring out new ways to create value with those so that they can turn into new products, and even in some cases, things we sell on our shelves again later. We decided that would be our waste goal.

And some of the fun things we've done there on our energy side ... First of all, we've set some really lofty goals around reducing the amount of energy in our stores, because being able to get to 100 percent renewable energy requires first that you go back and look at how much energy are you using. And so we've got some prototypes that we've put out there that are very aggressive in trying to reduce energy.

In fact, one in Las Vegas is up to a 40 percent reduction in energy use from the stores we were building back in 2005 -- not, you know, super-inefficient stores from 30 years ago, but literally our best, high-quality, super-efficient stores from 2005. This store is 40 percent more efficient than that one. And we've been able to make a lot of progress in doing a lot of the things that truly our customer's don't really see, but the stuff that makes a huge difference in our energy load, and one of the coolest things about that is that we've been able to do it in a way that's saved us a ton of money on our electricity bills. And it's been exciting, one, to be able to get that kind of progress with regard to energy efficiency in stores, but two, because we're putting a lot of money back to the bottom line with that ...

We recently announced an agreement where we're purchasing a lot of wind from Texas. We've done a lot of work with solar. We've even started putting our toes in the water and doing some small wind, micro-wind, projects in our own stores including one where we're trying out a windmill on top of a light pole, which is a really fun kind of way to think about how to produce energy at the store.

Our final goal is around products. If we work on really measuring and figuring out what more sustainable products are, we really learn a lot about how to take sustainability to the next level in what we're showing our customers.