Fueling smarter business through sustainability progress
By Niki King, Chief Sustainability Officer
As we recognize Earth Day, it’s important to reflect on the work Clorox is doing to ensure our business is growing thoughtfully and sustainably. This work is about more than just meeting goals; it’s about unlocking value for all we serve and creating lasting and positive impact on the world.
Tackling the global impact of our operations is not only an environmental imperative but can also be a powerful force multiplier for accelerating our IGNITE strategy. From reducing our operating costs to driving consumer value, our integrated approach to sustainability fuels our purpose to champion people to be well and thrive every single day.
Here are just some of the steps we’ve taken recently to bring that to life:
100% zero waste to landfill achieved across global plants
After more than a decade of steadily reducing waste in our operations, we’ve achieved ZWtL across our 32 manufacturing plants worldwide.* This milestone represents reduced costs, improved efficiency, and a more streamlined supply chain, while also marking meaningful progress toward our sustainability ambitions. Together, these help us fuel growth by realizing savings we can reinvest back into our business.
This was made possible through innovative problem-solving and operational transformation driven by our production teams. From our first ZWtL achievement in Fairfield, California, back in 2014, to our most recent wins in Missouri and Nevada, each site faced its own unique challenges on the journey to zero waste given the breadth of our product portfolio and nuances in local recycling approaches. Coordinating waste reduction, recycling, and reuse efforts across different teams, suppliers, and haulers required close collaboration and consistency.
Several plants concentrated on identifying local recycling partners and understanding their recycling and composting capabilities, which informed the sites’ purchasing decisions. Beyond traditional recycling, where waste is reused as raw material in new products, many of our sites also send discarded materials to be repurposed by local waste-to-energy or co-processing facilities. These practices support the creation of new products and energy while also reducing transportation costs by keeping waste processing closer to home.
As we celebrate this milestone, we recognize that reaching zero waste to landfill in our plants is not the end of the road, but part of a continuous effort. Maintaining waste reduction across our operations is crucial for our sustainable growth, ensuring that Clorox continues to tackle the footprint and resource intensity of our products while driving positive change in the industry.
* Where infrastructure allows. Global manufacturing plants where we have greater than 50% operational control, as of April 2025. For more information on Clorox’s ZWtL criteria, see page 53 of our FY24 Integrated Annual Report.
Our latest sustainable innovation
We have long understood that delivering value to our consumers means helping them reduce the environmental impact they leave behind. To achieve this, we continuously strive to enhance the circularity of our product portfolio by developing packaging solutions that use fewer and more sustainable materials. Here are a few of our latest product innovations created with the planet in mind:
- Our Pine-Sol brand has completed the transition to 100% post-consumer recycled plastic bottles across its entire portfolio, a shift that significantly reduces our reliance on virgin plastic and gives new life to recycled materials.
- The new Hidden Valley Ranch Easy Squeeze Bottle is designed with both precision and sustainability in mind, with a recyclable cap that makes it easier for consumers to enjoy their favorite ranch while supporting plastic recovery.
- With Clorox Scentiva ToiletWand Refills, we’re helping consumers cut down on waste by enabling them to reuse the original wand which helps keep additional plastic out of landfills.
New program aims to reduce scope 3 emissions
Our ambition is to achieve net-zero emissions across scopes 1, 2, and 3 by 2050. In the short term, we have set science-based targets to reduce 50% of absolute scopes 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions and 25% of absolute scope 3 GHG emissions by 2030.
Having achieved our near-term scope 1 and 2 target, now we need to go beyond our own operations, to cover our purchased materials, ingredients, and packaging, which we estimate accounts for 55% of our scope 3 GHG emissions. In other words, we’re taking on a major piece of our carbon footprint — one that extends beyond our direct control.
That’s where Clorox Climate Partners comes in, driving real impact where it matters most.
Launched earlier this month, this new program aims to foster collaboration with a subset of our suppliers to address the near-term environmental challenges we all face in the consumer goods sector. Specifically, we’re asking our partners to identify and act on reduction opportunities in line with their company’s emissions goals, share their progress publicly, and provide emissions data for their facilities or the products they supply to Clorox.
Clorox Climate Partners is all about working together to tackle emission hot spots with a win-win partnership that helps future-proof our businesses. After all, taking climate action not only reduces emissions but also boosts energy efficiency, lowers costs, sparks innovation for better products, and strengthens our ability to meet evolving regulations and consumer expectations.
Our Clorox teammates continue taking actions of their own
In honor of Earth Month, each year we drive a social impact campaign that galvanizes the passion of our teammates to build a more sustainable future. This year, The Clorox Company Foundation has seeded $145,000 in U.S. and Canadian teammates’ giving accounts to facilitate donations to nonprofits focused on environmental sustainability or an alternative cause of their choice. In 2024, some of the top environmental causes our teammates supported included organizations dedicated to climate action as well as ecosystem conservation and preservation. Through these contributions and volunteer initiatives, our teammates reinforce our enterprise-wide commitment to creating a lasting positive impact on our business and the world we all share.
We know our work is far from over, with many challenges in our path, and we must continually evolve alongside the rest of industry and the broader landscape. We believe we’re on the right track and will continue to work in close collaboration with our teammates, customers, suppliers, industry peers, partners, and policymakers to maximize our impact in pursuit of our ambitions.