At Carter’s, we believe in contributing to a better future for the next generation. We also recognize the emerging risks that climate change can pose for people and businesses everywhere. To do our part in leaving behind a world where our children can thrive, we and our industry must continue to reduce the environmental impacts of our products and operations.
Over the years we have launched a number of initiatives intended to reduce our overall environmental impact while also improving operational efficiency. Through this strategy, we have made significant progress in reducing the energy we consume, the emissions we generate, and the waste we send to landfills. While we are proud of the progress we have made, we continue to search for new opportunities to lessen our impacts, and we look forward to sharing our progress in this area over time.
Reducing Waste
Building a better future means being efficient with our resources and avoiding waste wherever we can. We are proud to have achieved a 95% landfill diversion rate in our distribution centers, which together generate a majority of the direct waste at Carter’s.
We plan to implement tracking processes to better understand our waste profile and over time reduce the waste generated in both our corporate offices and retail stores.
Recycling Programs
Since 2013, we have launched a number of recycling initiatives across our entire organization, aimed at increasing our landfill diversion rate and increasing resource efficiency:
- In our corporate offices, we began recycling all aluminum, cardboard, office paper, and plastics, and streamlined paper printing.
- In our distribution centers, we worked with vendors to recycle plastic bales and liners and reuse or recycle all cardboard.
- In our retail stores, we implemented single stream recycling and developed processes to recycle all materials associated with store closures and retrofits.
In total, these projects diverted a considerable amount of waste from landfills. These projects are ongoing and we continue to seek innovative ways to increase our diversion rate.
We are collecting and analyzing data to benchmark and improve our waste-reduction efforts. In 2018, the first year we conducted an inventory of our environmental data, we focused our data collection on material waste streams originating from Carter's distribution centers. We plan to expand our focus to also include Carter’s retail stores and corporate offices as better data is made available.
| Waste (metric tons) | 2018 |
|---|---|
| Total waste generated (direct and indirect) | 18,540 |
| Waste from direct operations1 | 3,269 |
| Waste from indirect operations2 | 15,271 |
| Distribution Centers - Waste to landfill | 149 |
| Distribution Centers - Waste to recycling | 3,120 |
| Percentage of waste diverted from landfill3 | 95% |
- "Direct" refers to Carter's owned operations (e.g., distribution centers (DCs), retail stores, corporate offices). For this assessment, waste data was only available for the DCs in US, Canada, China and Mexico.
- "Indirect" refers to the operations of Carter's vendors. Thirty percent of vendor facilities provided waste data and production data. These numbers are used to scale up to Carter's total production number.
- Diversion rate equals waste sent to recycling divided by total waste generated.