It's important to us to be good stewards of the environment and good neighbors in our communities around the world.
We're committed to preserving resources for future generations – and as such, we carefully review our operations for safety and compliance and look for ways to reuse materials or do more with less.
Waste and Recycling
We follow strict standard operating procedures and policies for the management of waste to ensure safe and compliant recycling, transport and disposal. This includes waste generated by our operations in offices, distribution and fulfillment centers and stores as well as company-owned inventory (e.g., packaging components, etc.) at third-party vendors when and where it requires disposal. Where we have direct control, we work with an extensive network of recycling and disposal partners while some stores’ waste and recycling services are managed by vendors contracted directly through our mall landlords.
We also continuously work with our teams and external recycling partners to identify economically viable outlets to reuse and recycle the materials from our operations.
Water
We recognize the significance of water as a natural resource and the critical need to safeguard it. As a business, we interact with water in a variety of ways. At our own operations, it’s part of our environmental footprint as we use water in our field stores and home offices (in bathrooms, demonstration sinks, kitchens, chillers, etc.). We also use water as an ingredient in products, and, through our sustainable sourcing risk assessment tool, identified it as one of our priority ingredients as we work to focus our sustainable sourcing strategy in the future.
In 2023, we took initial steps to set the foundation for our future water program. We partnered with EDF to conduct a water assessment and measure our direct water usage footprint. Overall, the findings validated that a majority of our direct and ingredient water use is in and around Columbus, Ohio, the water basins of which are considered ‘Medium to High’ Baseline Water Stress according to the WRI’s Aqueduct tool. While our central business functions are not located in a water-scarce part of the country, some of our stores and fillers are. We now have our baseline to reference as we build a more robust water program in the future.
As we look ahead, we will continue our assessment of water interactions and look forward to solidifying our water strategy in the near future.
