ATLANTA, Sept. 15,
2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Home Depot®, the
world's largest home improvement retailer, announced today it will
prepare racial equity and deforestation assessments in
response to shareholder proposals from the company's 2022 annual
meeting of shareholders. These assessments will expand on the
information previously shared in the company's annual
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report on the progress
of the company's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs,
sustainability and environmental efforts, and actions taken to
combat deforestation. Both assessments will be conducted by a
third-party firm with recognized expertise.
The Home Depot's ESG efforts include proactive initiatives and
goals around three fundamental pillars: focus on its people,
operate sustainably, and strengthen communities. The planned
assessments will help the company benchmark its DEI and responsible
forestry programs, highlight the ways the company is upholding its
commitments, and potentially identify opportunities to enrich its
efforts.
The Home Depot's Office of DEI leads the company's diversity
reporting, which includes gender, ethnicity and pay equity data for
the company's workforce. The company has numerous initiatives
designed to increase the diversity of its workforce, promote
inclusion, amplify support for diverse suppliers, and enrich the
communities it serves. In 2020, the company added an explicit focus
on equity to promote fairness, combat bias and ensure associates
and business partners have access to the resources they need to
succeed at work. In 2021, The Home Depot spent $3.3 billion with Tier I diverse suppliers and
recently announced a goal to spend $5
billion annually by 2025. The Home Depot's U.S. workforce is
consistently more ethnically diverse than the U.S. working
population, based on U.S. Department of Labor data.
The Home Depot's sustainable forestry initiatives extend more
than 25 years and reflect the company's recognition that
responsible forest management is essential to protecting the health
of the world's ecosystems, biodiversity, and the more than one
billion people who depend on forests for their
livelihoods. The company works with suppliers that adhere to
set standards of forest management and tree species selection. To
help protect endangered forests and support efforts to preserve
timber for future generations, the company first issued its Wood
Purchasing Policy in 1999. Since then, The Home Depot has continued
to work to lead its suppliers to understand and practice
sustainable forestry throughout the world. The deforestation
report, together with the company's plan to participate in the CDP
forests survey, will provide greater transparency and highlight the
company's efforts to ensure its sustainable forestry
operations drive positive change.
The company expects to publicly release its reports on these
assessments by the end of its fiscal 2023 year.
ABOUT THE HOME DEPOT
The Home Depot is the world's
largest home improvement specialty retailer. At the end of the
second quarter of fiscal year 2022, the company operated a total of
2,316 retail stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico. The company employs approximately
500,000 associates. The Home Depot's stock is traded on the New
York Stock Exchange (NYSE: HD) and is included in the Dow Jones
industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index. The Home
Depot is #17 on the 2022 Fortune 500.
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SOURCE The Home Depot