About REI > Stewardship > 2008 Stewardship Report > Environment > Methodology

Methodology

Updates and Corrections

This report covers REI's 2008 fiscal year, and is our third annual report (following our 2006 and 2007 reports).

  • We report on all of our operations, which are all U.S.-based. The exception to our US-based operations is our international REI Adventures trips that run in 41 countries.
  • We include the impacts from both owned and leased facilities.
  • In one notable case, we report directly on third-party vendors to talk about our fair labor and factory compliance work, which details our efforts with our REI-brand gear and apparel supply chain. We contract all of our manufacturing to third-party vendors.
  • Also, our report covers our operational footprint (both direct and indirect aspects) but it does not tackle accounting for the embedded environmental attributes of products.

We have five restatements and changes to note (which are also addressed in their respective sections).

  1. We restated our 2006 and 2007 CO2 data for employee commuting. Through more nuanced modeling in 2008, we were able to correct overestimations from previous years for the commuting impact of our retail employees. Our 2006 number drops from our previously reported CO2e of 20,000 tons to 15,213 tons CO2e. Our 2007 number drops from our previously reported CO2e of 17,130 tons to 14,814 tons CO2e. This restatement effectively makes reaching our 2009 climate goal more difficult.
  2. We misreported REI total sales in 2007’s Paper Efficiency Table. The table was built using a preliminary annual sales number of $1.329 billion that was not replaced with our final audited number. The correction to $1.342 billion has minor impacts on the efficiency ratios listed for 2007.
  3. Our methodology for estimating our waste impact also became more refined in 2008. Thus, our 2007 and 2008 estimations are not directly comparable.
  4. We changed our employee survey questions in 2008. Questions in 2008 are similar, but not comparable, to previous years.
  5. Our employee demographic categories have been updated to match federally mandated EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) classifications, so categories are not comparable to previous years.

Note: The waste charts and table were updated on October 6, 2009 to correct an error in overstating retail construction waste. The initial data was partially double counted for the 2008 calendar year.

REI’s specific environmental methodology and policies are here:

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