Community Impact

Going the distance on Earth Day

Learn the lengths (literally) Walgreens is going to make sure we have a healthy planet for future generations.
Leo Pellegrini and Tom Wall, Walgreens Stories
Walgreens was recognized by the U.S. Department of Energy as a 2021 Better Buildings Challenge Goal Achiever for reducing energy intensity by 20% across 100 million square feet of retail space  that's 2-1/12 times the area of Central Park.

Since transitioning to a digital version of our weekly newspaper advertisement, we avoided up to 15,000 tons of waste paper, translating to potentially 49,500 cubic yards of landfill space saved. That's equivalent to the volume of 17 hot air balloons.

Thanks to a partnership with Alveole, Walgreens currently has 39,000 bees in our on-campus hive, which support pollination efforts in a three-mile radius around campus. If all our bees stood on top of each other, they'd be nearly as tall as Willis Tower.

Since the launch of myWalgreens this past fall, customers have been encouraged to receive their receipts electronically, saving an estimated 87 miles per day of receipt paper – more than 15 times the elevation of Mount Everest.

In the past year, we launched new guidelines for store team members to help discourage customers from using plastic bags at checkout. Since the new guidelines launched, stores have used 4,835,000 fewer plastic bags. Lined up end-to-end, the bags we saved would reach halfway from Los Angeles to New York.

For our Red Nose Day Buddy Bench project, Red Noses were collected at recycling stations at stores and made into benches for donation to schools. Since 2019, 28,500 Red Noses have been repurposed into benches. Lined up, the Red Noses would run slightly longer than the Kentucky Derby.

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