Environment

Our customers and members use our products and services to get outdoors, and our continued business success depends on having a healthy natural environment. Traditional business thinking connects business growth with increasing negative impacts on the environment. We aspire to run our business where connecting more people with the outdoors can be done with the least negative impact, and find solutions where running our business improves the environment.

Today, public and private companies are implementing social and environmental strategies that go beyond compliance or one-time actions to deliver benefits such as cost reductions, employee and customer engagement, and the protection of the natural world. To act upon opportunities where the best business decision can also be the best environmental decision, we must collaborate with our industry partners, the communities we serve, and nonprofit organizations. Truly sustainable business projects and actions cannot happen in isolation.

Our environmental strategy targets five areas where we see the best opportunities to decrease our environmental impacts while supporting the business strength and success of the co-op. These areas include:

• The reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)
• Finding sustainable solutions to our paper usage
• Reducing waste and optimizing recycling
• Actively working towards green buildings
• Addressing the challenges of product stewardship

These focus areas were identified in 2005 by a diverse group of REI leaders who looked at REI's largest environmental impacts and opportunities and concluded that these areas were the most critical to address. These areas also represented efforts where REI had the greatest ability and influence to collaborate with others to create broader positive impacts.

Our methodology for measuring our environmental impacts is based on best practices—adopted to match REI's circumstance—to assess each area of its environmental footprint.

Comments

We welcome your thoughts on our 2008 stewardship report through the following survey or email at stewardship@rei.com. Your feedback supports our ongoing goal of providing relevant information that is important to our members, customers, partners, employees and others.