Product Stewardship

Much of REI's environmental and social impact can be attributed to the products we sell. Ensuring that the products we sell are designed with the environment in mind requires examining each product's full lifecycle and identifying opportunities to reduce the environmental impacts in each stage of development. This requires collaboration across our industry and throughout the greater supply chain. We made progress in this area in 2008, and we also identified much of the work that lies ahead.

Highlights

Because a large portion of our environmental impact comes from the products we sell, we have focused on industry collaboration to advance product stewardship within the outdoor industry in addition to the work we've done internally to address product stewardship and packaging.

In 2007, we introduced REI's ecoSensitive label, identifying products that met specific criteria and which demonstrate improved environmental performance compared to their conventionally-manufactured counterparts. To qualify as ecoSensitive, a product had to be made with a high percentage of organic fibers—such as organic cotton, hemp, bamboo fiber or wool—and/or a high percentage of renewable or recycled fibers such as post-industrial recycled polyester, recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic and polylactic acid (PLA). In 2008, we strengthened the criteria for a product to be called ecoSensitive. At the same time, the number of ecoSensitive products we offered increased from 40 in 2007 to more than 250 in 2008.

In late 2008, REI became a member of bluesign technologies ag, which allows the co-op to use the bluesign independent standard as part of its product design and sourcing process for REI-branded apparel and cycling products. We consider the bluesign standard as the strongest global solution available to proactively address textile environmental, health and safety strategy.

While we may have made considerable progress in the short-term by focusing solely on product stewardship internally, the benefits of external collaboration will enable a longer lasting and far-reaching impact. Our involvement with industry-wide collaboration through the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) Eco-Working Group to develop a common framework to measure and report on the impact of outdoor gear and apparel continues. The OIA Eco-Working Group is a collaboration of over 90 outdoor industry brands, suppliers, manufacturers and other stakeholders working to create a shared methodology for measuring and reporting product impacts. One of our greatest opportunities as a prominent retailer is to be a connector of other like-minded organizations on efforts where we can participate in the influence of entire supply chains. This is a place where REI believes that cooperation is much more important than competition. In participating in the Eco-Working Group, REI is able to partner with like-minded peers to raise awareness of the importance of product stewardship within the outdoor industry as a whole, and among industry leaders in particular.

Challenges

With the increase in popularity of manufacturers' marketing claims about the environmental and social merits of their products, we hear more consumer confusion around what these claims mean. As more suppliers pitch the "green" benefits of their products, the claims get harder to verify because of a lack of resources and available knowledge about each product. However, our efforts with the Eco-Working Group will help develop the tools necessary to validate the environmental claims of products, and our collaborative work with the industry in 2008 will ultimately come back to benefit our customers and the environment.

Looking Forward

As we look ahead, we are revamping packaging for REI products in order to reduce our environmental footprint; our new packaging will be on store shelves in 2010. We have also formed a partnership with the Outdoor Industry Association's Packaging Working Group to help reduce the environmental impacts from product packaging across the outdoor industry. We anticipate this effort to will help reduce the industry's environmental footprint inside and outside the walls of REI.

The bottom line is that while product stewardship presents challenges, we must continue our work to provide products that are manufactured in an environmentally and socially responsible way.