Product and packaging improvements.

We removed cardboard trays from our private label 24-pack bottled water, saving more than 13 million trays or 2.2 million pounds of cardboard per year. Additionally, our bottles have been reconfigured to fill a “nestled” pack, allowing us 16% more packs on each pallet.

Here are other examples of sustainability improvements we’ve made:

• We make every effort to reduce our resource usage. One example is a recent change in how we ship our ice cream. By using a steadier pallet in our Lakeland, Florida, Dairy plant to stack ice cream, we found that we no longer need to use cardboard slip sheets used to protect the ice cream. That saves nearly one million square feet of cardboard each year!
• We reduced 19,000 pounds of plastic by switching from a 2.5-gallon container of cleaning solution to a 1.5-gallon container of ultra-concentrated core cleaning and sanitation chemicals.
• We removed plastic stirrers from our company breakrooms and cafeterias and in our retail cafés, replacing them with wooden stirrers, saving more than 5,200 pounds of plastic annually.
• We removed foam coffee cups from our company breakrooms and cafeterias and replaced them with paper cups, saving more than 61,700 pounds of foam annually.
• We switched to a slider bag for our deli meats and cheeses, which is lighter and made with stronger plastic—reducing our yearly use of plastic by more than 327,000 pounds.
• We installed cutlery stations at each of our Deli counters, removing the need for plastic-wrapped cutlery sets. This eliminates the need for the outer wrap and lets our customers take only the cutlery they require. The removal of the overwrap and the new, lighter-weight cutlery saves an estimated 35,600 pounds of plastic per year.
• We worked with our receipt paper supplier to reduce the size of the plastic core in the paper rolls, reducing the amount of plastic needed to hold our receipt paper by more than 8,000 pounds annually.
• We changed our Bakery Café cold cup lids from polystyrene to a more recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
• We reduced the amount of paper in our Bakery muffin cups by 23%, saving 13,000 pounds of paper per year.
• We eliminated 7,900 pounds of corrugated cardboard annually by working with our supplier to reduce the size of the sidewalls on our Italian wedding cake trays.
• We saved 28,000 pounds of plastic by reducing the amount of material in our reusable wine bags.
• Rather than ship meat to our Deli plant in non-recyclable cardboard containers, four of our suppliers now ship in reusable plastic bins, saving about 204,000 pounds of cardboard each year.
• We eliminated 35 million separate date, price, and product description labels by consolidating this information onto a single-scale label that acts as a security seal on the packaging, which also reduces the chance of product spillage.
• We reduced the amount of polystyrene foam and hard-to-recycle cardboard used to transport seafood products to our stores by switching to returnable plastic totes for our seafood shipments.
• We worked with our cotton mop supplier to remove the plastic sleeves our mops are shipped in.
• We are working towards providing on-package recycling instructions for our Publix-branded items through our membership in the How2Recycle® Program. Learn more about How2Recycle on their website how2recycle.info.*

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