FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MEDIA CONTACT: Stefanie Spear, sspear@asyousow.org, 216-387-1609

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA—AUGUST 20, 2020—The Kroger Co. announced this week new sustainable packaging goals that fail to acknowledge the urgency of the plastic pollution crisis, and lag competitor commitments.

For the last two years, As You Sow filed shareholder resolutions with Kroger urging the company to make its private label packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable. The proposals were strongly supported by shareholders, earning nearly 40 percent support in 2019 and in 2020. 

“As the largest grocery retailer in the country, Kroger has a responsibility to be a leader in this space and set a high bar for sustainable packaging,” said Conrad MacKerron, Senior Vice President of As You Sow. “These new commitments do not reflect the urgency of the global plastic pollution crisis and fall far short of what the company needs to be doing.” 

The company responded to shareholder requests by pledging to make its Our Brands packaging 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2030, a date that lags far behind direct competitors like Walmart. Under the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Global Commitment, Walmart and more than 100 companies have pledged to make their packaging fully reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025, five years sooner than Kroger’s commitment. 

Global Commitment signatories also committed to an average of 25 percent recycled content in plastic packaging. Despite global concerns around plastic pollution, Kroger set no recycled content goal for plastics, only a mixed recycled content goal of 10 percent, a number that can be inflated by materials like paper than have higher recycled content rates. Further, the company actually weakened a previous pledge, slashing its goal of 20 percent recycled content material in half. The company’s other stated goals, such as general waste reduction, lack accountability metrics.

One bright spot in the company’s announcement is its plan to pilot some of its Our Brands items in reusable packaging in early 2021 as part of the company’s partnership with reusable packaging platform Loop. 

“We are pleased to see this modest shift into reusable packaging, a move that adheres to the waste hierarchy of avoiding waste first, and relying on recycling second,” continued MacKerron. “We look forward to continuing to engage the company on setting metrics for its venture into reusable packaging and improving its packaging goals in order to move towards a circular economy for packaging.”

For more information on As You Sow’s work on plastics, click here.

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As You Sow is a nonprofit organization that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy, coalition building and innovative legal strategies. Click here to see As You Sow’s shareholder resolution tracker.