GREENER PRODUCTS
The Home Depot’s greatest environmental impact comes from the products we sell, and our biggest opportunity to create change is by helping customers live more sustainably. We work with suppliers to encourage the production of greener products, which we, in turn, offer to our customers.
Eco Options
The Home Depot’s Eco Options® program helps our customers identify products that have less of an impact on the environment. It also encourages our suppliers to provide more sustainable offerings. For a product to receive Eco Options classification, the supplier must document attributes that prove it has less of an impact on the environment than comparable products in the same category.
Eco Actions
Our Eco Actions® website provides customers with new content, insights and ideas from innovative partners to inspire sustainable action. Projects cover everything from how to install water-conserving shower faucets, to the benefits of organic gardening.
+CHECK IT OUT: The Home Depot was honored with four Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Awards in 2021.
Energy-Saving Products
The Home Depot encourages suppliers to make the products we sell more energy efficient, and our partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star® program supports those efforts, too. In fiscal 2021, we offered over 22,000 energy-saving products in stores and online, including more than 15,000 Energy Star products. We sold more than 200 million units of Energy Star products, which we estimate helped save over $950 million on energy costs and lower carbon emissions by over 4.9 million metric tons.
Water-Saving Products
We work with our suppliers to offer products that help our customers conserve water, saving them money and protecting our planet’s resources. In stores and online, we offered nearly 8,000 water-saving products, including more than 5,000 products bearing the EPA’s WaterSense® label. We sold more than 21 million units of WaterSense products in fiscal 2021. We estimate our customers’ purchases and proper use of WaterSense products in fiscal 2021 helped reduce annual water consumption by over 66 billion gallons, which would mean collective savings of more than $873 million on water bills.
+DID YOU KNOW: Our company has been a WaterSense Partner of the Year eight times since 2011, receiving the Sustained Excellence awards in three of those years.
CIRCULARITY
Since we introduced Circularity as one of our Eco Options’ pillars in 2019, our focus has been to prevent products and packaging from becoming waste throughout the product lifecycle. We encourage suppliers to innovate in how they produce and package products for reuse and longevity. We also look for circularity opportunities within Home Depot operations.
+CHECK IT OUT: Discover how circularity factors into the ways we’re reducing our company’s impact on the planet and enabling our customers do the same.
Along with our suppliers and vendors, we are developing our thinking and capabilities around circularity in an effort to:
-
Design with the environment in mind
-
Eliminate excess material
-
Eliminate materials that are not readily reusable or recyclable
-
Minimize mixed materials to enable simpler disassembly and recycling
-
Utilize materials that are biodegradable or readily recyclable
-
Utilize recycled content, when possible, without compromising product efficacy
-
Facilitate the reuse of material indefinitely
-
Promote minimization of environmental impact in manufacturing and consumer use
+DID YOU KNOW: Our customers dropped off nearly 1.2 million pounds of rechargeable batteries with us for recycling in fiscal 2021 — a 24% increase since 2014.
SUSTAINABLE PACKAGING
Our packaging innovations reduce waste, increase shipping efficiency and decrease product damage. We work with our private-label product suppliers to apply science to creating better packages. From 2017 through fiscal 2021, we redesigned 652 packages to reduce size and materials.
We continue to look for substitutes for expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) film in our private-label packaging. Both EPS and PVC are difficult to recycle and can take a long time to biodegrade. We’ve committed to eliminating EPS and PVC from our private-label packages by the end of 2023. We’re scouting out even small amounts and replacing EPS and PVC with easier-to-recycle materials like molded pulp and paper.
+CHECK IT OUT: We’re compressing EPS waste from our operations into foam blocks that can be repurposed into new products, such as insulation — keeping the material out of landfills. Meet the entrepreneurial associate who launched this initiative.