Macy's, Inc. Announces Sustainability Initiatives to Promote a More Circular Future
Macy's, Inc. is committed to creating a brighter future for all and a more fair and sustainable future through its social purpose platform, Mission Every One. Macy's, Inc. provides an update on its progress toward long-term sustainability goals, including efforts that promote circularity throughout its value chain.
Keelin Evans, vice president of sustainability at Macy’s, Inc., said:
"As a leading, omnichannel retailer, we understand the role we play in creating a more equitable and sustainable future for all. We are committed to promoting a more circular economy across our value chain. Our efforts are focused on providing sustainable and ethically produced brands, products, and services to our customers while reducing our impact on the environment through operations. We’re going to achieve this through our guiding social purpose platform, Mission Every One, and an enterprise-wide collaboration with partners, designers, suppliers, logistics partners, entrepreneurs, colleagues, and customers.”
Macy's intends to enhance its sustainable products by including circular solutions and services, highlighting opportunities that extend a product's life.
To help drive this goal and begin the transition to a more circular business, Macy's joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation community earlier this year, which is focused on accelerating and enabling the transition to a global, circular economy, and FABSCRAP, a non-profit in New York City that helps ensure that fabric waste, an unavoidable part of the design and development process, is responsibly reused, upcycled, downcycled, and recycled.
Macy's Private Brand team has embraced technology to reduce waste by reducing the number of physical samples necessary from suppliers without compromising fit, colour, or other design factors. This technique has considerably reduced textile waste. By the end of the 2022 development season, 61% of all samples would have been created digitally, up from 5% in 2019. This change actively keeps products that would otherwise be discarded from ending up in landfills.
To reuse and extend the life of all items, Macy's reverse logistics team is dedicated to returning goods from customers to sellers, manufacturers, or resellers to continue the product's lifecycle. Macy's customers help ensure the responsible lifecycle of their clothes, toys, and other pre-loved items by downloading a pre-paid shipping label from the Macy's website and sending them to be donated for resale and recycling.
Furthermore, both Macy's and Bloomingdale's provide easily available care instructions and initiatives to assist customers in extending product life and reducing water and electricity use. Repair services for things such as jewellery, watches, and furniture are accessible through WorryNoMore Protection Plans and a partnership with My Jewelry Repair.
As part of its 2025 goal to recycle as much material as possible, the Macy’s beauty products team launched a pilot program to minimize environmental impact by shipping outdated collateral to a third party to be recycled rather than disposing of it in-store. Macy’s also launched a program to use RFID technology to track participation and weights of store cardboard recycling as part of our goal to increase store recycling rates to 80% by 2025.
Source: Macy's
