What You Should Know:
- Bath & Body Works evaluates opportunities to reduce, reuse, recycle and compost waste, seeks to use fewer and more sustainable materials and advances end-of-life options for products.
- Bath & Body Works diverts unsold products from landfills through innovative product distribution programs such as associate sales and donations to nonprofit organizations, including a partnership with Good360.
At Bath & Body Works, waste reduction and management play a key role in building a sustainable future. Reducing waste conserves raw materials and energy, which helps the company reach its climate targets, and effective waste management helps protect resources for the future and can decrease disposal costs.
The brand evaluates opportunities to reduce, reuse, recycle and compost waste whenever possible, prioritizing source reduction as the preferred method. This includes waste generated by operations in offices, distribution and fulfillment centers and stores, as well as company-owned inventory (e.g., packaging components) at third-party vendors when and where it requires disposal.
The company also looks for opportunities to use fewer materials and less packaging, to use more sustainable materials, including recyclable or recycled materials and to advance sustainable end-of-life options, such as reuse.
DIVERTING UNSOLD PRODUCTS FROM LANDFILL
In the retail sector, products that can no longer be sold to customers are a leading source of waste. Bath & Body Works has innovative recycling programs to help evaluate these materials for reuse and recycling feasibility. Through partnerships with external recycling partners, the brand works to help give a second life to some of its products, including soaps and surfactants, ethanol-containing products, aerosols and fragrance oils — all of which can be used for other products and purposes.
Bath & Body Works associates also have the chance to buy surplus products at heavy discounts. Through an annual sample sale, for example, the brand sold nearly 5,700 boxes filled with over 399,000 units of product in 2024.
Another way the brand keeps unsold products out of landfills is by donating them to nonprofit organizations that serve people in need. Since early 2023, Bath & Body Works has worked with Good360 to find donation outlets across various markets for marked-out-of-stock products (products unable to be sold to customers, e.g., end-of-season products). In 2024, the brand scaled its partnership with Good360 from a pilot program to a chainwide initiative across the U.S. and Canada with its stores and distribution and fulfillment centers donating over 1.4 million units of marked out-of-stock product. This waste and recycling/reuse data is based on fiscal 2024 information from contracted waste and recycling vendors of Bath & Body Works, and the company is continuing to further advance the collection of this data. In the interim, it’s important to note that some waste and recycling services are not included, some estimates are included for stores where the brand does not have visibility into waste bills, and this data has not been audited.
Learn more about how Bath & Body Works reduces waste and its contribution to Good360 in the 2024 Sustainability & Impact Report. For more information about Good360, visit good360.org.
