At its 2019 sustainability milestone summit, Walmart announced that for the first time, checkout carousels at its U.S. stores will include reusable bags that will be available to customers for purchase. The aim of this new campaign is to help reduce plastic waste and increase customer convenience by placing reusable bags in easy to find and highly frequented sections of its stores. As part of the launch, Walmart is rolling out a new assortment of reusable bags that are made with post-consumer recycled content. The new reusable bag initiative will begin rolling out to stores next month and follows a recent announcement by Walmart on a series of plastic waste reduction goals that seek to advance the sustainability of the retailer’s private brand packaging by making it 100 percent recyclable, reusable or industrially compostable by 2025. This year’s milestone summit also featured announcements and updates on several other sustainability initiatives. For example, the event marks the two-year anniversary of Project Gigaton, a platform in which Walmart is working with suppliers to avoid 1 billion metric tons, a gigaton, of emissions from global value chains by 2030. Click Read More below for additional detail.

BillerudKorsnäs is among 5% of the corporations participating in CDP’s climate change program to be awarded a position on the Climate “A” List. The purpose of the list is to recognize companies’ actions to mitigate climate change in the past reporting year. The list is requested by 822 investors representing more than a third of the world’s invested capital. “2015 is an important year for our climate with the Paris conference COP21 as a milestone. In combating climate change all parts of society have to participate and we are extremely pleased that the dedicated efforts of BillerudKorsnäs now have been recognized by CDP.

Representatives from nature conservation, tropical forestry and the forest industry have all be elected onto the PEFC International Board, following a unanimous vote by the PEFC General Assembly in the Helsinki, Finland. Alongside two returning Board members, Riikka Joukio (forest industry and processing) and Hervé Le Bouler (NGO), we are delighted to welcome two new board members: Gerald Pfiffinger (ENGO and conservation) and Mohd Nurudeen Iddrisu (tropical forestry). "We need forest certification in developing countries," said Dr. Iddrisu, following his acceptance onto the Board. "Now as part of the PEFC Board, I want to take it upon myself to reach out to my fellow ‘countrymen’ in the tropical countries in order to get certification into the national agenda." Click Read More below for additional information.