Sears Holdings: Green Business

Green Business I chose to use Sears and Kmart, also referred to as Sears Holdings, as my company for this Green Business lab paper. Sears Holdings is a combination of both the Sears store and Kmart. As of January 2017, Sears, “full-line stores included 670 stores located across all 50 states and Puerto Rico” one of those 670 stores is right here in Augusta, GA (Reuters.com). In January 2017, the Kmart branch has “operated 735 Kmart stores across 49 states, Guam, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands” (Reuters.com). Unfortunately, the Augusta, GA store closed its doors in 2016. Sears Holdings has many environmental sustainability initiatives for all their stores. For instance, they are working on conserving energy. In 2015, Sears won the ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year award “in both retail and energy management categories” (Searsholdings.com). They did this by using the SHC Energy Team that “tracks energy usage at various retail locations and distribution centers by using data metrics from several various sources” (Barnes, 2015). Sears Holdings also encourages its workers to conserve energy by having them consider their stores to be like their homes.

By creating this program Sears Holdings became “the first broad line relater to join the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Responsible Appliance Disposal (RAD) program in 2007” (Searsholdings.com). This program allows stores to haul away and appropriately dispose of their members old appliances and household utensils. Furthermore, “this means SHC recovers and properly disposes of the ozone-depleting chemicals from the discarded appliances, reducing CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases”