A year in review
Sustainability report update compares goals with progress
An important annual project for us is updating our Costco Sustainability Commitment. This update sheds light on areas where we’ve made progress toward our goals, and areas where we can still improve. Here are some highlights.
Reducing waste while helping those in need. A key goal is to decrease the amount of waste from our warehouses that goes to local landfills, which also reduces our costs and carbon emissions. We continue to improve each year and are now at a 78.3% diversion rate, although our goal remains 80%.
Improvements in recycling and donating food have allowed us to contribute more than 70 million pounds of food from our warehouses to Feeding America for distribution to local food banks. We have also grown our partnership with World Vision to donate first-quality items, valued at $137 million, that used to be destroyed, recycled or returned to suppliers, to people in need around the world.
Forest conservation efforts. Our policy is to source our wood-, paper- and fiber-based products from responsibly managed and certified forests. Certification indicates that standards and controls are in place to protect the environment and people in those communities. We have the most success here with our Kirkland Signature™ products, such as bath tissue and paper towels. Today, 99.9% of these products, sold globally, are certified. We are working toward 100% certification, bringing gift tissue and photo paper into certification.
Packaging improvements. Our strategy in this area is fourfold: Reduce the amount of packaging overall; increase the recycled content and certified fiber in it; increase its recyclability and compostability; and label packaging to clearly communicate recycling or composting instructions to our members.
In 2021, we reduced plastic by more than 17 million pounds over the previous year. Examples include changing apple packaging from plastic clamshells to corrugated boxes, replacing some plastic jars and tubs with bags, and doing away with plastic wrap altogether, such as with individually wrapped Kirkland Signature apparel shipments.
These are just overviews of a few important topics. If you’d like to learn more, I encourage you to review our Sustainability Commitment. Find it at Costco.com; search “sustainability” at the top of the page.
