Creating a sustainable future

Our company was built on the premise that our long-term future is best served by respecting the interests of all our stakeholders: Partners, customers, suppliers and the wider community.

Our sector and society are facing significant challenges, so it is more important than ever that we respond to these issues while staying true to our founding principles and our values.

Societal challenges like climate change and social inequality as well as ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals guide our thinking. Customers are aware of the strain that our planet is under and their expectations of retailers are growing.

It’s against this backdrop that we’ve built our corporate responsibility strategy, which directly supports the Partnership’s business plan. We have three overarching commitments:

• We’ve committed to have all of our operations Net Zero Carbon by 2050. Net zero means that we will remove all the carbon emissions we can but for emissions we can’t, such as our own livestock or air travel, we will balance the difference by generating our own renewable energy

• All of our heavy delivery vehicles to be bio-methane by 2028 for both John Lewis & Partners and Waitrose & Partners.

• We’ve removed all 5p single-use plastic bags from Waitrose & Partners shops.

• Pledged £1 million in grants to fund projects targeting the prevention of plastic pollution through the Waitrose & Partners Plan Plastic.

• 70% of the plastic in Waitrose & Partners own-brand product packaging is already widely recyclable. We aim to increase this to 80% by 2020 and 100% by 2023.

Read more about our work to create a more sustainable business.