Future home improvements

By Lucy Douglas

The retail landscape has always been something of a competitive field. Stores and brands across the world all strive to offer their customers better service, a wider array of products, cheaper prices than their neighbours, and the recent recession has made the business environment for retailers more cutthroat than ever. But today the sustainability agenda looks set to take over as one of the key drivers for businesses in the coming years. With green products enjoying one of the greatest growth rates of any sector in the European retail market, global brands such as Tesco pledging to eliminate carbon emissions from their operations over the coming years, and consumers becoming ever more environmentally conscious, sustainability is fast becoming the latest must-have for retailers. “If you think about it,” says Ray Baker, Director of Corporate Responsibility at home improvement retail giant Kingfisher, “sustainability principles should be good business principles. So if our sustainability strategy says for example we should be saving energy, we should be saving waste, we should be giving better advice to our customers, in turn that’s going to save us money and increase our sales.”

Kingfisher is something of a pioneer of sustainability in the retail industry. Almost 20 years old, the Kingfisher sustainability programme was borne from the company's UK operating brand, B&Q. "It was in the early 90s that [B&Q] started to look at social responsibility," Baker explains, telling me how a journalist asked the then marketing director how much tropical timber B&Q sold. "The response was, we didn't know, and the journalist said, ‘If you don't know, you don't care,'" he explains. This incident was one of the factors that sparked the sustainability practices that have set the firm up a market leader in this area today. Following that phone call, B&Q embarked on a programme to know just how sustainable its timber was. "Other initiatives were also brought into place at that time," Baker adds "such as the pioneering of paints with low volatile organic compounds (VOCs). But I suppose the kick start was the sustainable timber, and at the time there was a real push." Baker explains how B&Q was instrumental in the forming of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC),the international, non-government organisation dedicated to promoting responsible management of the world's forests. Today, he says, the FSC is the best-recognised certification process for ensuring legal and sustainable timber.. In 2009 over 95% of all B&Qs wood sold came from responsibly managed sources.

Fast forward to 2010, and Kingfisher is still a market leader in this sector, with its sustainability practices still heralded as some of the best in the market, earning the firm a number of awards in recognition of this feat. In June of this year, the company was awarded the Business Commitment to the Environment (BCE) ‘Peter Parker' Award 2010, one of the world's longest running international environmental recognition, for its commitment to sourcing sustainable timber. Within the same month, the company was also awarded first place in the Environmental Leadership category of the Business in Community (BITC) Awards for Excellence for its work on ‘spearheading sustainability and delivering value'.

"Within our operating companies in the UK and France, there have been some big initiatives," Baker tells me, "and I suppose the one that we're pioneering at the moment in the UK is the eco-shops within stores." Eco-shops, he explains, are specialist areas within a store that specifically promote an extensive range of eco-products, as well as give thorough, and often much needed, advice to customers about how best to implement sustainable practices into their homes and save money by reducing their energy bills. "And indeed," he adds, "what they're doing to ensure that the staff within the stores are trained, is to introduce the City & Guilds Qualification for eco-advisers. The idea is to have, in the UK, about 1,700 in place by the autumn of this year."

The first of these eco-stores began operating in January last year, in B&Q's flagship branch in New Malden. Indeed, the B&Q brand, as a pioneer of sustainable practices in the retail market, has been established as the guinea pig for Kingfisher's sustainability initiatives. Baker explains that once such initiatives have proved themselves successful in the British market they will then be rolled out into Kingfisher's other operating platforms. The eco-stores initiative, for example, has already been implemented in the French market, within Castorama, under the name La Maison Eco, and the group hopes to be able to implement similar ventures across all its operations.

Sustaining the future

The eco-store venture is part of Kingfisher's wider Future Homes strategy, an action plan for sustainability that has two main aims: to help consumers create greener homes (through initiatives such as the eco-store) and to embed sustainability across the company's business operations. Baker explains that it helps the company to focus, giving a system of comparison across the board. "It is focused on seven key goals," he explains. "These are business driven goals, but they relate to sustainability. And underpinning these goals is a management system that we call ‘Steps to Responsible Growth'."

The ‘Steps' system requires each of the Kingfisher operating companies to progress towards sustainability along a prescribed path by achieving a number of goals and objectives outlined within the system. This method allows the company to ensure a consistent and realistic progress of sustainability, taking into account the cultural differences of the individual markets in which each brand operates in.

Indeed, cultural differences within a company that has five operating brands, across eight different countries, with around 80,000 employees present a big challenge when monitoring sustainability practices. In order to ensure continued high standards of sustainability across the organisation, Kingfisher implements a fairly rigorous, three-tiered auditing system. "We audit the progress both through our own internal audit program," explains Baker, "and through an external business, who audit the data, but also we have an independent stakeholder panel made up of NGOs, investors, suppliers, and they look at what we achieve in our reporting progress, critique that and tell us whether things should improve, where we should strengthen up, where we should go faster."

Clearly Kingfisher pulls out all the stops to demonstrate that it is at the forefront of the sustainability movement; Baker explains that the firm has the same meticulous attitude to its products, ensuring that everything branded and sold as an ‘eco-product' has been verified by a partner company. B&Q had about 4,000 such products - products that essentially reduce the overall impact of a building has on its environment, for example low-energy light bulbs ¬- on its shelves last year, and Castorama just over 5,000. "What we certainly don't want to do is be seen as green washing," Baker explains, reiterating the importance of having such certification standards. And it is a necessary protocol with the consumer market becoming increasingly sustainability-conscious. Last year Kingfisher racked up £1 billion in sales of eco-products, the equivalent of 10 percent of its total sales, and Baker reveals that the company is looking to increase that figure. "What we are working on at the moment," Baker reveals, "is a range of products that will be, if you like, the best of the best of all the eco-products."

Ultimately for Baker, sustainability is not just one initiative; it represents the way that Kingfisher should do business. "I think that, to me, sustainability goes hand in hand with the growth of an organisation," he says. "I think there's only one growth, and that's sustainable growth. And I think that what will happen and what is already happening is that the challenge of individual sustainability initiatives will just be the way of a business."