Room & Board director of sustainability Emily McGarvey talks with Green Builder Media's Sara Gutterman about the furniture retailer's B Corp certification, its urban wood program, and its 2030 emissions and renewable electricity targets.
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Sara Gutterman: I am here today with Emily McGarvey, the director of sustainability for Room and Board. Room and board just announced that you have become a big corporation. Can you tell us what it is and why it's important?
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Emily McGarvey: The Corp certified company has gone through a rigorous certification process to really take a look at some high standards of verified social and environmental impact. That's public transparency. And there's also a legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. So it's really a business that's been looked at fairly thoroughly. And they're really using their business as a force for good.
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Emily McGarvey: And so that's the process that room and board has gone through. And we are thrilled to received our certification.
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Sara Gutterman: Can you tell me specifically about some of room and Board's ESG initiatives and commitments?
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Emily McGarvey: So we have used materiality to figure out which is our top priorities and where we should spend our time and resources. And so our overall aspiration is to have a positive impact on society in the world. And then we organize the work that we do within better products, better for people and better for the planet. And within that, we have different issue areas that are most material and most important to us.
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Emily McGarvey: So from a product side of things, it's really come down to sustainable materials, chemicals and then packaging. And then we look at the people side of things around our staff well-being. It's our commitment to American made and having 90% of our products made in America. And then on the operations side of things, we're really looking at clean transportation waste and renewable electricity.
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Emily McGarvey: And so those kind of nine priorities is what really guides our work and really kind of just continuing to dig deeper and deeper on the issues that are most important.
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Sara Gutterman: I've been following your Urban Lumber initiative for a while. Can you talk a little bit more about that, please?
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Emily McGarvey: Yeah, it's a really exciting initiative. It's actually the US Forest Service reached out to us in 2018 and they said, we've got this really interesting private public partnership that we'd like you to be a part of. In Baltimore and in Baltimore, they were deconstructing homes and wanting to take the beautiful wood that was in those row homes and turn it into something.
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Emily McGarvey: And so the room and board team, the designers and the team went out there and said, what can we do with this wood? It's beautiful. Yellow pine first growth. Like, what can we what can we turn this into? And so that has translated into the urban wood projects kind of spreading from city to city over the last several years, where a new city has wood that's either coming down from trees that need to come down from the urban canopy for different reasons, or building deconstruction.
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Emily McGarvey: And again, the designers go and kind of say, okay, what kind of would do we have here? What does it look like? What can we translate that into. And and traditionally all this would just goes into landfill. And so it's this beautiful solid wood and what can we do with it. And so we have been working with wood from the hood and some other partners here in Minneapolis, and taking that those ash trees and turning them into beautiful heirloom furniture.
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Emily McGarvey: And so we have our All-In dining table. That's that's transforming this ash into into this beautiful table. And so we've been doing that in different cities around the country. So I think we're in Baltimore, Detroit, Minneapolis, it was areas in California as well. So it's been a really exciting project because essentially we're setting up circular supply chains, and because we have 90% of our manufacturing happening in the US, we have the wood that needs to come down.
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Emily McGarvey: We can divert it, bring it to local manufacturers and then be able to sell it in our 22 showrooms across the country.
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Sara Gutterman: Now, I know that a lot of companies have set targets to reach carbon neutrality by 2030. Does room and board have such a target, and if so, can you talk about the highlights and where you are in that journey to carbon neutrality?
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Emily McGarvey: Absolutely. So we are looking to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030. And then we're also looking to get to 100% renewable electricity by 2030. So carbon neutrality is absolutely the ultimate goal. And what we've been looking at is where where we have the most emissions and what we can do to divert those. So one thing is what we call our clean transportation effort.
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Emily McGarvey: So we move heavy furniture around the country. And so how can we do that in the most effective way and get to electrifying our fleet. And so our delivery trucks that we have that goes to our customers homes. We right now have some hybrid vehicles, but we're working on how can we fully electrify our fleet. And then from a from a renewable electricity standpoint, we just finished putting rooftop solar on our central office or I'm sitting right here today.
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Emily McGarvey: So that was really exciting to see the solar panels go up. And then we're also buying green energy from our utilities. So we're at about 70 to 75% renewable electricity. And then we're exploring things like heat pumps in warmer climates and other things. So turning on the lights and moving furniture around the country is our biggest piece of that puzzle, at least when it comes to scope one and scope two.
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Emily McGarvey: And so that's where we're really digging in to help decarbonize.
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Sara Gutterman: Becoming a B Corp has that enables you to make decisions differently because of the governance structure.
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Emily McGarvey: I would say that the organization has always operated balancing profit and purpose, but the B Corp certification requires that you make a change to your governance. So you we actually changed our articles of incorporation to say that we'll take into account all stakeholders and not so not just profit, but we're thinking about staff and community and the environment and things like that.
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Emily McGarvey: So it puts a fiduciary responsibility into our governance structure. And so what that really does is make sure that the mission and vision that we have had in the last 43 years will continue on into the future, regardless of of of who might be here today and who might be here in the future. So really solidifying that mission to help us continue to make great choices in the future.