Walmart talks big about sustainability, but its land-use strategy is anything but climate-friendly: It builds massive new stores on virgin land in sprawling areas, then abandons them in favor of still newer, still bigger stores, says Stacy Mitchell, Grist.

Even as Walmart has been hyping its supposed environmental epiphany, it has continued to unroll vast, low-rise supercenters at breakneck speed. Since launching its sustainability campaign in 2005, Walmart has expanded the amount of store space it operates in the U.S. by 32 percent. It's added more than 1,100 new supercenters, almost all built on land that hadn't been developed before Walmart showed up. The chain now has 698 million square feet of store space in the U.S., up from 530 million in 2005, plus another 287 million around the globe. Its U.S. stores and parking lots cover roughly 60,000 acres.

Earlier this year, the New Jersey Sierra Club and the Pinelands Preservation Alliance tried but failed to block a permit for a new Walmart supercenter in the small coastal town of Toms River. The development, now moving forward, will destroy habitat for the threatened northern pine snake. What's especially frustrating about the project, local environmentalists say, is that Walmart already has a store in Toms River. It's just a mile down the road and will be shuttered when the new supercenter opens.

This article is part of a series on Grist examining Walmart's environmental efforts, click here for the full story.