Director: TED, Best Buy, Tim Dunn, take one.
Tim Dunn: The climate crisis that we're in can be so daunting to think about, it's so systemic. How do I, as an individual, step into this space and make a difference?
Just think of your house or your apartment where you have everything on. Plugging your refrigerator in: big energy draw in your house; plugging your TV in, full family entertainment, there's another energy draw. You take your stove, your dishwasher, your clothes washer, your clothes dryer. If you take those minor things that we do every day and you can influence that, that is the picture that we can draw to say: here's where we can have the impact.
[In the Green: The Business of Climate Action]
[Presented by: TED Countdown and The Climate Pledge]
[Tim Dunn; Company: Best Buy; Sector: Electronics; Location: USA]
We are a large retailer, unique in a sense that most thing that we sell plug in, have a battery, consume energy in some way. The use of a product sold is part of our emissions inventory. Everything we've put out into the market that's plugging in to the electrical grid, we are in some form part of that ownership for that carbon.
When we started putting pen to paper and saw the carbon impact of the use of products that we sell, it was 40 times that of our own operation. So that’s where we set out to say: if you’re plugging in at home, that has to be part of our goals to reduce it.
We went through and looked at what items are we putting into customers homes that do have a significant energy draw. So it was at that point we started to see the scope of Energy Star. Energy Star is a partnership at the EPA and Department of Energy in the US to set a standard to develop the most energy efficient product. How can you make this thing work its best but consume the least amount of energy in that process? And that became the conversation with our vendors. If we can have an impact on that customer's energy bill, helping them live more sustainably, that's your story, too. And so we can go from a customer plugging in a new product, being thrilled with their experience, to 100 customers, to 1,000 customers.
Our next step is how sustainable that product is at end of life. Circularity is what we need to get to. We're going to account for that. When a customer brings that product home, that's just one part of the interaction. Once that product has met its end of life for that customer, bring us that product back. We will evaluate that product to say: Is there any use in trade-in? Does it need to be repaired? We'll put it through our repair process. If it's truly end of life, we will put it into our recycling programs that have vetted partners, held to the highest standards, that's fulfilling the customer promise end to end, but it's also fulfilling our environmental obligations end to end. At the core of it, every single product that we're putting in customers homes, we are there through every single point of that product life.
Global climate change is impacting us on a scale -- our stores, our employees our customers -- that not doing something about it is an impact to our business. The time is now to make a difference and accelerate all of our goals and get to net-zero by 2040.
