Home Depot has achieved an Olympian feat where plastic packaging is concerned. More specifically, as detailed by Trellis, the company eliminated enough Styrofoam to fill 67 Olympic-sized swimming pools in 2023 alone.
In a move worth noting, Home Depot, the largest home improvement store in the world, has eliminated Styrofoam and PVC plastic film from packaging used for its private-label products. Both materials are hard to recycle and, like other plastics, take tens to hundreds of years to break down.
The publication also reports that the U.S. Plastics Pact lists both materials as "unnecessary" or "problematic" and that the chemicals used to manufacture them have been linked to human health issues, including cancer.
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Home Depot's initiative to remove them meant redesigning over 1,000 packages between 2017 and 2023. Candace Rodriguez, senior director of sustainability at Home Depot, told Trellis that this resulted in lighter, smaller packages. Smaller, or "right-size," packaging allows more packages to be loaded onto trucks. In turn, this results in fewer heavy trucks on the road putting toxic gases into the air that greatly contribute to Earth's overheating.
Plastic packaging is also a major environmental problem. Only about 5% of plastic waste gets recycled in America. The rest clogs landfills and oceans, creating tons of planet-warming pollution and breaking down into dangerous microplastics.
On top of this achievement in plastic packaging reduction, Home Depot also aims to cut out 200 million pounds of virgin plastic by the end of 2028 through packaging reductions and substituting recycled or alternative materials.
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"From a circular economy perspective, moving toward materials that can be reused or recycled at their highest value presents one of the most impact strategies for long-term sustainability," said Benjamin Elizalde, project manager and sustainability consultant at circular economy advisory firm Metabolic, per Trellis.
Olga Kachook, director of sustainable packaging initiatives at nonprofit GreenBlue, told the publication that plastic and Styrofoam have specific properties that are hard to replace, stating that "finding alternatives is important and commendable work."
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