Victory! Costco Agrees to Stop Selling Unsustainable Seafood

Changing the industrialized food system oftentimes starts in grocery store aisles. No situation makes this fact more evident than Costco's agreement to stop selling threatened species of fish and implement a seafood sustainability program.

Today, Greenpeace announced that Costco, North America's largest wholesale club operator, agreed to the terms of the non-profit's "Oh-No-Costco" campaign. The campaign demanded that Costco immediately stop selling species of fish listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species and institute a publicly available seafood sustainability program that lessens the store's environmental impact. Eight months after the campaign launched, Costco has agreed to most of Greenpeace's conditions, marking a huge step forward in ocean conservation.

"It was a long and arduous process," said Casson Trenor, Greenpeace's seafood campaigner. "I'm really happy with where we've gotten to, and I think it says a lot about our methods and how effective we can be."

Those methods required some serious pressure and creative campaigning strategies from Greenpeace. For eight months, activists passed out information flyers in Costco stores across the country, surveyed what species of fish individual stores were selling, and even flew Greenpeace's airship over Costco's headquarters in Seattle. The campaign also included a significant Internet component, with more than 100,000 people signing Greenpeace's online petition to Costco's CEO, Jim Sinegal. More than 18,000 of those signatures came from Change.org members.

Costco's agreement to comply with Greenpeace's terms is a significant step forward considering just how unsustainable the wholesale club's seafood offerings were. Costco offered up some of the most overfished species out there, like Chilean sea bass, orange roughy, and Atlantic halibut. The store's poor record of environmental stewardship earned it one of the lowest scores on Greenpeace's annual "Carting Away the Oceans" report, which ranks supermarkets on their seafood sustainability programs.

The world's oceans are in dire straits, with 75 percent of global fisheries fished beyond the point of sustainability. Some populations of fish like bluefin tuna and shark have declined by as much as 80 and 90 percent in recent years. It was about time that someone put Costco on the hook for its role in decimating the world's oceans.

While there's still room for improvement in Costco's seafood department, the wholesale club operator made major moves in a greener direction. It agreed to not sell12 kinds of fish associated with environmental concerns, including orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, shark, Atlantic halibut, Atlantic cod, Greenland halibut, grouper, monkfish, red fish, skates and rays, swordfish, and bluefin tuna. The national grocery chain also pledged to support best practices in aquaculture because so much of its seafood offerings include farmed salmon and shrimp. Costco will apply these sustainable seafood ideals not only to the fresh and frozen seafood cases, but to canned tuna, one of the most ignored types of seafood.

These plans are all steps forward, and to make sure that Costco's sustainable seafood program continues to grow, the store has partnered with World Wildlife Fund (WWF). You can bet that Greenpeace will also keep a watchful eye on the superstore to make sure that it honors all of its promises.

That's not to say that there isn't room for improvement in Costco's seafood scheme — Greenpeace fully admits that while this program is a major win, it's far from perfect. For one, a proviso states that Costco can stock the 12 Red List species it agreed not to sell if the store can source those fish from a Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)-certified fishery. MSC has come under scrutiny for its oftentimes lax regulations, certifying fisheries as sustainable when they're really not. "The whole policy has room for improvement," said Trenor. "It's so much further from where Costco was given its size that it really is going to make some serious progress. I'm looking forward to watching the company over the next year."

You can see just how much Costco improved when Greenpeace releases its next "Carting Away the Oceans" scorecard this April. Costco was ranked 17th in 2010 — Trenor believes that given these new commitments, the store will make a significant jump up the list.

Photo credit: greenwenvy08 via Flickr