So Wal-Mart got a lot of press last week for the announcement that it would be creating something it called a sustainability index.

Walmart today announced plans to develop a worldwide sustainable product index during a meeting with 1,500 of its suppliers, associates and sustainability leaders at its home office. The index will establish a single source of data for evaluating the sustainability of products.

“Customers want products that are more efficient, that last longer and perform better,” said Mike Duke, Walmart’s president and CEO. “And increasingly they want information about the entire lifecycle of a product so they can feel good about buying it. They want to know that the materials in the product are safe, that it was made well and that it was produced in a responsible way.

You have to give credit to their PR people (Edelman?). I mean this is one class A PR effort. When I heard about this earlier in the week I honestly did not really care to think much about it. I figured at least they were trying to do something good for a change. Now that I’ve read Philip Mattera’s surgical smackdown I now have a change of mind!

Rating products is a good idea. It’s already being done by various non-profit organizations that bring independence and legitimacy to the process. Wal-Mart, by contrast, brings a lot of negative baggage. In recent years, Wal-Mart has used a purported commitment to environmental responsibility to draw attention away from its abysmal record with regard to labor relations, wage and hour regulations, and employment discrimination laws. It also wants us to forget its scandalous tax avoidance policies and its disastrous impact on small competitors. The idea that a company with a business model based on automobile-dependent customers and exploitative supplier factories on the other side of the globe can be considered sustainable should be dismissed out of hand. Yet Wal-Mart is skilled at greenwashing and is, alas, being taken seriously by many observers who should know better.

They are indeed very skilled at their messaging and spin. They’ve made it into a science really. I honestly get tired of blogging about Wal-Mart but when you’re the biggest corporation in the world doing so many bad things I guess you make good copy.