GREENER PRODUCTS
We believe our greatest environmental impact comes from the products we sell, and our biggest opportunity to create change is by helping introduce customers to more sustainable products.
Eco Actions
We look for opportunities to help educate our customers on ways they can reduce their environmental impact through the projects they take on. Building on the progress we made with our Eco Options program, which we launched in 2007 and focused on helping customers identify products that have less of an environmental impact, we rebranded this program in 2021 under our new Eco Actions® program. Our Eco Actions program now provides our customers with the resources they need to take individual action on environmental issues.
+CHECK IT OUT: Our Eco Actions website offers insights and ideas on how people can do their part in their homes and gardens to create meaningful change.
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 2022, we offered approximately 26,000 energy-saving products in stores and online, including approximately 15,000 ENERGY STAR products. We sold more than 177 million units of ENERGY STAR products.
We estimate our customers’ purchases and proper use of ENERGY STAR products in fiscal 2022 helped reduce annual electricity use by 3.8 billion kilowatt hours, saving $554 million on energy costs and lowering carbon emissions by 2.6 million metric tons
Water-Saving Products
In fiscal 2022, we continued to help our customers conserve water in their homes and businesses. Across our stores and online, we offered approximately 7,500 water-saving products, including nearly 6,200 products bearing the U.S. EPA’s WaterSense label, and we sold more than 22 million units of those WaterSense products.
We estimate our customers’ purchases of WaterSense products in fiscal 2022 helped reduce annual water consumption by over 33 billion gallons, which would collectively mean savings of more than $686 million on water bills
+DID YOU KNOW: In 2022, our company was recognized for the 6th time as a WaterSense Partner of the Year since 2011, receiving the Sustained Excellence awards in three of those years.
CIRCULARITY
Since we introduced circularity as one of our sustainability pillars in 2019, our focus has been to prevent products and packaging from becoming waste throughout the product lifecycle.
We strive to offer products with a positive environmental impact, and we encourage suppliers to innovate in how they produce and package products for reuse and longevity.
These efforts are behind the motivation of our new goal to reduce or convert 200 million pounds of virgin plastic used in products to recycled or alternative material by the end of 2028.
Along with our suppliers and vendors, we are developing our thinking and capabilities around circularity in an effort to:
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Design with the environment in mind
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Eliminate excess material
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Eliminate materials that are not readily reusable or recyclable
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Minimize mixed materials to enable simpler disassembly and recycling
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Prioritize materials that are biodegradable or readily recyclable
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Utilize recycled content, when possible, without compromising product efficacy
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Maximize the reuse of material
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Promote minimization of environmental impact in manufacturing and consumer use
+CHECK IT OUT: The Home Depot’s Eco Actions website provides customers informational resources to help reduce waste and find ways to give products a second life - everything from composting to battery recycling to harvesting leaves for mulch.
SUSTAINABLE PACKAGING
Our packaging innovations reduce waste, increase shipping efficiency and decrease product damage. That’s good for the planet and our business.
The Home Depot’s packaging team works with our private-label product suppliers to apply science to creating better packaging. Our goal is to reduce package footprints and use more sustainable materials to secure and protect the private-label products we sell. From 2017 through 2022, our packaging innovations allowed us to redesign more than 1,000 packages to reduce size and materials.
In 2020, we committed to eliminating EPS foam and PVC film from our private-label packages by 2023, prompting us to dig even deeper for results. As we close in on the completion of this goal, we are excited to extend our commitment to circularity with the announcement of our new packaging goal:
- All of our private-brand fiber packaging for new SKUs in our U.S. and Canada stores will be compostable, recyclable or recycled content beginning in fiscal 2027.