The world’s first plastic-neutral retailer updates its Plastic Free by 2025 commitment and launches the Beyond Plastic™ Impact Tracker to engage customers directly on new goals
Grove Collaborative Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: GROV) (“Grove” or “the Company”), the world’s first plastic-neutral retailer, a leading sustainable consumer products company, Certified B Corporation, and Public Benefit Corporation, today announced new sustainability goals and an update to its Plastic Free by 2025 commitment.
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Grove Collaborative launches the Beyond Plastic™ Impact Tracker, an exclusive tool that discloses the personalized plastic savings in each order and over their lifetime as a customer to engage customers more directly in the fight against single-use plastic waste. To learn more, visit www.Grove.co/impact (Photo: Business Wire)
Beginning today, Grove has set a new sustainability goal to avoid 15 million total pounds of single-use plastic waste — the equivalent of 495,000,000 standard water bottles1 — from entering the environment by 2030 and will maintain its plastic neutrality commitment set in 2020. The new goal is an update to the Company’s Beyond Plastic™ program and is further supported by today’s launch of the Beyond Plastic™ Impact Tracker — a tool that discloses the amount of plastic avoided and recovered in each order to engage customers more directly in the fight against single-use plastic waste.
“We at Grove Collaborative have a bold ambition to transform an industry that has been reliant on single-use plastic by creating and curating products that leverage more sustainable materials and formats to enable our customers to go Beyond Plastic™,” said Jeff Yurcisin, CEO of Grove Collaborative. “We are proud to be leading this charge and are recommitting to reduce the use of single-use plastic waste through new goal targets — while continuing to call on other companies to join us.”
Grove is also providing an update on its Plastic Free by 2025 commitment. In 2020, the Company set out to be 100% plastic free by 2025 to jumpstart its own progress toward reducing plastic waste and influence the broader industry. Grove made significant progress on its commitment through several industry-leading initiatives, including plastic-free product innovation through its flagship owned brand, Grove Co.™, and leading its own industry-led Plastic Working Group with 130+ of its brand partners. The Company reports on its progress through its annual Plastic Scorecard and introduced the first industry plastic intensity metric that measures the Company’s progress in decoupling its revenue from plastic. Despite this progress, the plastic crisis remains massive and requires more industry-wide change — including more private sector participation, more scalable alternative materials, and continued consumer education.
“In 2020, we set an ambitious goal to become plastic free by 2025, which pushed our Company to aggressively innovate and collaborate while enabling change in our own business and across the industry,” said Yurcisin. “We have learned an incredible amount in these past four years and while we’re extremely proud of the progress we’ve made, collectively we — our partners, our suppliers, and our broader industry — are not there yet. And despite being 18 months away, we know we won’t reach our goal of being 100% plastic free. We are just as committed to being a part of the solution to the plastic problem and are confident our new plastic goals will reignite the urgency for our industry to continue transforming with us.”
Avoiding 15M Pounds of Plastic by 2030
Beyond Plastic™ is Grove’s collective dedication to reducing single-use plastic in the products customers use every day, focused on two core measurements:
- Plastic avoidance is achieved by offering products with little to no single-use plastics, leveraging materials with higher recyclability like aluminum, glass, or paper so customers can avoid purchasing plastic in the first place.
- Plastic recovery is achieved through Grove’s plastic neutrality commitment where, for every ounce of plastic sold to customers on Grove’s website and through brick-and-mortar retail partners, the same weight of ocean-bound plastic is recovered from nature through the Company’s ongoing partnership with rePurpose Global.
Today, Grove has committed to avoiding 15 million total pounds of plastic by 2030, calculated based on the weight of plastic avoided in each customer order by opting for products that contain less single-use plastic2. Through creating products under its flagship Grove Co.™ brand and curating over 240 other brands that prioritize sustainability, Grove Collaborative has built one of the largest selections of sustainable products for customers to avoid plastic in their everyday essentials. Customers can easily search and shop for reduced plastic alternatives through the Company’s Beyond Plastic™ digital badging system, which identifies products that are 100% Plastic Free, 95%+ Plastic Free, or contain No Single Use Plastic. Grove has already made significant progress against its new 2030 goal, having avoided 7.8 million pounds of plastic since 2020 — already passing the 50% mark on the way to making their new goal by 2030.
In addition to plastic avoidance, for any plastic that is sold through Grove.co or brick-and-mortar retail partners such as Target and CVS, the Company will continue to recover the equal weight of plastic from the environment. Since 2020, Grove has also recovered more than 16 million pounds of plastic through plastic recovery platforms.
Beyond Plastic™ Impact Tracker
Grove’s progress to-date on plastic avoidance and plastic recovery has been achieved through the efforts of its customers, whose individual orders contribute to the overall plastic metrics that are core to the Company’s sustainability goals. To help the customer better understand their individual impact — as well as the impact of the broader Grove community — by shopping with Grove, the company has announced the Beyond Plastic™ Impact Tracker.
The Impact Tracker is an exclusive tool that provides Grove customers with their personalized plastic savings in each order and over the lifetime of their Grove orders since 2020 while also sharing how that contributes to the entire Grove community’s collective impact. A customer’s plastic savings are calculated by adding the weight of plastic avoided and plastic recovered in each order and cumulatively. This information will be communicated back to the customer on their order confirmation screen and email, through a member homepage widget, and on a core Impact Tracker page.
By providing their individual impact, Grove hopes customers become more empowered to make sustainable choices and lean into sustainable swaps, better supporting their individual sustainability journeys. As the world’s first plastic-neutral retailer, Grove is uniquely positioned to bring this tool to market and, since 2020, the Grove community has avoided and recovered 24.5 million pounds of plastic — the equivalent of over 808,000,000 standard water bottles.1
Progress Over Perfection
Grove will not be 100% plastic free by 2025, but the Company continues to make progress and lead the retail and consumer product industries from the front. Since 2020, Grove has:
- Become the first plastic-neutral retailer in the world.
- Joined the 5% of B Corporations that have maintained certification for more than ten years after first being certified in June 2014.
- Operated as a Public Benefit Corporation since March 2021.
- Grown the number of brands selling reduced plastic products on Grove.co from 160 to over 240, including 22 brands that are plastic neutral through rePurpose Global, up from zero brands in 2020.
- Certified 33% of the 3,000+ products sold on Grove.co — including 63% of Grove Co.™ products — as 95%+ plastic-free through the Beyond Plastic™ digital badging system.
- Created and published its plastic intensity score — or pounds of plastic per $100 in net revenue — on a quarterly basis to decouple their revenue from plastic, reducing the score for the full Grove business from 1.48 pounds in 2020 to 1.10 pounds in 2023.
- Driven consumer behavior change by offering a large assortment of concentrated, refillable, and reusable products that contain little to no single-use plastic, have high and strict ingredient standards, and don’t compromise on efficacy.
- Established the Plastic Working Group, composed of over 130 brand partners’ sustainability leaders, for ongoing knowledge sharing on how to address the plastic crisis.
- Maintained ongoing relationships with suppliers to partner on materials science innovation for use in Grove Co.™ brand products.
About Grove Collaborative
Launched in 2016 as a Certified B Corp, Grove Collaborative Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: GROV) is transforming consumer products into a positive force for human and environmental good. Driven by the belief that sustainability is the only future, Grove creates and curates more than 240 high-performing eco-friendly brands of household cleaning, personal care, health and wellness, laundry, clean beauty, baby, and pet care products serving millions of households across the U.S. each year. By serving as the trusted destination for conscientious consumers who want to make the right choices for their families and the planet and providing access to knowledgeable Grove Guides, Grove makes it easy for everyone to build sustainable routines and Be a Force of Nature.
Every product Grove offers — from its flagship brand of sustainably powerful home care essentials, Grove Co.™, to its exceptional third-party brands — has been thoroughly vetted against the Grove Feel Good Standard, which guarantees strict ingredients criteria, 100% plastic neutral orders, carbon neutral shipments, and high quality performance in addition to being certified cruelty-free and ethically produced. Grove is a public benefit corporation on a mission to move Beyond Plastic® and is available at select retailers nationwide, making sustainable home care products even more accessible. For more information, visit www.Grove.co.
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1 Based on the standard weight of 16.9 oz. single-use plastic water bottles (33 water bottles = one pound of plastic)
2 To calculate how much plastic a product can avoid, Grove finds the difference between the amount of plastic in the leading packaging format of a conventional, single-use plastic product of equal size or number of uses and the amount of plastic in a reduced-plastic product purchased from Grove.
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