Sustainability Committee

Overview

RILA’s Sustainability Committee is composed of retail sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) executives focused on enabling more environmentally sustainable and circular business opportunities. Sustainability executives address issues that affect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the efficient and responsible use of natural resources, and product- and material-lifecycle value retention. They also manage responses to stakeholder requests for information on sustainability performance.

The retail industry sees increasing interest in internal and external-facing sustainability goal setting, as it works to improve measurement and management of environmental performance of retail operations and product lifecycles; to facilitate product transparency and traceability and to serve as a source for innovative solutions to other core retail business challenges.

The Sustainability Committee provides RILA members a forum for executives to benchmark and hear from experts regularly on rotating topics related to the implementation, management, and oversight of retail sustainability programs. The committee has two annual in-person meetings (one co-located with the Circularity conference), benchmarking surveys, and bi-monthly, focused benchmarking calls on members’ highest priority issues.

RILA members have full access to past meeting and call content, reports and benchmarking results which can be found below.

For more information on RILA's Sustainability Committee, contact Erin Hiatt, senior director, sustainability and innovation at erin.hiatt@rila.org.

Updates/News

Miss our February meeting? On February 11 & 12, the Sustainability Committee met alongside the Environmental Compliance Committee in Austin, TX. We had 53 attendees representing 23 retail companies. Program members can access the meeting summary below. Reach out to learn what we discussed and how you can get involved in our next in-person meeting in June at Circularity 19 with the Retail Council of Canada.