Category: Retail

Loop touts retail store expansion as standalone e-commerce program sunsets

Read the full story at Waste Dive.

Loop, TerraCycle’s reusable packaging program, ended 2022 with about 150 active retail locations worldwide. This includes about three dozen U.S. locations, with grocery pilots at Fred Meyer in Oregon and Giant Food in Washington, D.C., and home delivery for Walmart customers in Arkansas.

Loop launched in 2019 as a standalone e-commerce platform to manage reusable container distribution and collection, but that concept largely is being phased out as the retail program gains traction. Going forward, Loop’s e-commerce presence will be integrated with partners, such as Walmart’s home delivery website, according to the company.

Loop plans for further growth in 2023, with announced expansions coming in France and Japan. It will also work with U.S. retail partners to build the reuse ecosystem and increase product distribution, although concrete plans haven’t yet been made public, according to Clem Schmid, general manager at Loop Global.

Your merchandise was made in a sweatshop. Now what?

Read the full story at Supply Chain Dive.

When it comes to supply chain ethics, retailers may no longer be able to cede responsibility to the brands they sell.

Lowe’s commits to net zero emissions across entire value chain

Read the full story at ESG Today.

Home improvement retailer Lowe’s announced today a series of new climate commitments, including a goal to achieve net zero emissions across its value chain by 2050.

As the outdoor industry ditches ‘forever chemicals,’ REI lags behind

Read the full story at Grist.

Last week, REI Co-op stores around the country closed for Black Friday. It’s a company tradition dating back to 2015, where the outdoor retailer asks customers to “opt outside” rather than participate in a post-Thanksgiving shopping spree. 

But there’s one thing that REI hasn’t yet opted out of: a class of compounds known as “forever chemicals.” By using these chemicals in its water-resistant outdoor clothing, a coalition of nonprofits and health experts says REI is needlessly polluting the environment and damaging people’s health.

Are Amazon delivery hubs making neighborhoods less healthy and more dangerous?

Read the full story from The Guardian.

Brooklyn residents are using air quality and traffic sensors to see how new warehouses affect their community.

‘Fast furniture’ is cheap. And Americans are throwing it in the trash.

Read the full story in the New York Times.

Americans bought piles of furniture during the pandemic, with sales on desks, chairs and patio equipment jumping by more than $4 billion from 2019 to 2021, according to a market data company. And a lot of it won’t survive the decade.

Fast furniture, which is mass-produced and relatively inexpensive, is easy to obtain and then abandon. Like fast fashion, in which retailers like Shein and Zara produce loads of cheap, trendy clothing that’s made to be discarded after only a few wears, fast furniture is for those looking to hook up but not settle down. It’s the one-season fling of furnishings.

Many of the Ikea beds and Wayfair desks bought during the Covid-19 lockdown were designed to last about five years, said Deana McDonagh, a professor of industrial design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “I relate to fast furniture like I do to fast food,” Ms. McDonagh said. “It’s empty of culture, and it’s not carrying any history with it.”

5 lessons from Closed Loop Partners’ challenge to reinvent retail bags

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

The single-use plastic retail bag is a highly visible symbol of our incumbent linear, take-make-waste system: these bags are used for an average of 12 minutes before they end up in landfills and waterways for hundreds of years. Transitioning this entrenched product into a circular system takes a concerted effort — one powered by unprecedented industry collaboration. That’s where Closed Loop Partners’ Consortium to Reinvent the Retail Bag comes in — working with some of the largest players in the retail industry, and accelerating some of the most forward-thinking innovators, to begin to move the needle.

Walmart partners with Loop for reuse

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

In Northwest Arkansas, reuse is being delivered to residents’ doors. That is, if they shop Walmart’s InHome delivery service, which this week started offering an assortment of goods in reusable packaging, in partnership with Loop, TerraCycle’s reuse platform. 

Walmart InHome service allows customers to have groceries and other goods delivered to their homes and now they’ll be able to get products in reusable containers from brands such as Gillette, Cascade, Kraft Heinz and Seventh Generation in their orders. During the deliveries, customers can also turn in their empty containers from previous orders.

The companies expect to add additional products in the coming months, for a total of about 30 by the end of 2022, up from about 10.

Another Goodwill resale site launches as the market takes off

Read the full story at Retail Dive.

A group of Goodwill organizations, largely from the Midwest and West, on Tuesday launched an online resale marketplace dubbed GoodwillFinds. Net proceeds from purchases will go to the region where the item was sourced, according to the group’s press release.

GoodwillFinds is operating under license from Goodwill Industries International and joins another Goodwill-affiliated site, ShopGoodwill.com, which was created in 1999 by Goodwill of Orange County. ShopGoodwill didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

The new effort is led by former Modcloth CEO Matthew Kaness, who was briefly at Walmart after the retail giant acquired the online apparel business, and has also held roles at Urban Outfitters and Afterpay, per GoodwillFinds’ release.

Beyond the Plastic Bag: Sparking a Seachange for Reuse

Download the document.

While we know the greenest bag is the one a customer already owns, and the Consortium to Reinvent the Retail Bag is advancing research and testing to increase instances of customers bringing their own bags, the focus of this report is specific to the testing of reusable bag systems undertaken in summer 2021. We share our learnings from conducting first-of-a-kind reusable bag pilots across select CVS Health, Target and Walmart stores, where customers could “borrow” a bag and use it multiple times before returning it at the same or a different brand’s store to be washed, redistributed and reused by other customers.