Macy’s announces sustainable initiatives to promote circularity

A brighter future for everyone as well as a more equitable and sustainable future are goals of Macy’s, Inc.’s social purpose platform, Mission Every One. The achievements made in achieving Macy’s, Inc.’s long-term sustainability goals, including programs that support circularity throughout its value chain, are detailed in an update released today.

Keelin Evans, vice president of sustainability at Macy’s, Inc, said that as a top multichannel retailer, they are aware of their part in building a future that is more fair and sustainable for everyone. They’re dedicated to supporting a more circular economy across their value chain. They’re working to reduce their operations’ environmental effects while offering their consumers brands, goods, and services that are created sustainably and ethically. This will be accomplished through the enterprise-wide engagement of partners, designers, suppliers, logistics partners, entrepreneurs, coworkers, and consumers as well as through their guiding social purpose platform, Mission Every One.

By providing circular solutions and services and emphasizing possibilities that extend a product’s life, Macy’s wants to advance its sustainable product. In order to achieve this goal and start the transition to a more circular business, Macy’s joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation community earlier this year. FABSCRAP is a non-profit organization in New York City that works to ensure that fabric waste, an inevitable byproduct of design and development, is responsibly reused, upcycled, downcycled, and recycled.

The firm has also launched a number of programs to reduce, reuse, and recycle throughout its operations and private and market brand product offerings during the past 15 months.

The Macy’s Private Brand team has adopted technology that enables suppliers to provide fewer physical samples without compromising fit, color, or other design concerns in order to decrease waste. Textile waste has greatly lowered because of this technology. By the end of the 2022 development season, 61% of all samples had been created digitally, up from 5% in 2019. This change actively prevents waste product from ending up in landfills.

Additionally, Macy’s has implemented best practices to minimize packaging, such as standardizing packing carton sizes and using less packaging materials.

The Macy’s reverse logistics team is committed to transferring items from customers back to the sellers, manufacturers, or sold to resellers to prolong the lifespan of the product. This helps to reuse and extend the life of all products. By downloading a pre-paid mailing label from the Macy’s website and sending their gently used clothing, toys, and other goods to be given for resale and recycling, shoppers of Macy’s may help the responsible lifetime of those products thanks to the retailer’s cooperation with Give Back Box.

In addition, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s both provide easily accessible care guidelines and initiatives to assist consumers in extending product life and lowering water and power usage. Repair services are offered for goods including jewelry, watches, and furniture through WorryNoMore Protection Plans and collaboration with My Jewelry Repair.

The Macy’s beauty products team started a trial effort to reduce environmental impact by delivering old collateral to a third party to be recycled rather than disposing of it in-store as part of its 2025 objective to recycle as much material as possible. As part of our mission to raise shop recycling rates to 80% by 2025, Macy’s has introduced a program to employ RFID technology to track participation and weights of retail cardboard recycling.

These programs are some of the most recent instances of sustainable initiatives and practices implemented by Macy’s, Inc. to positively benefit people, the environment, and the communities we serve. Visit macysinc.com/purpose for additional details on Macy’s, Inc.’s sustainability programs and reporting.