Earth Day

Earth Day is observed nationwide on April 22. At Lands’ End, Earth Day is celebrated throughout the entire week – so it’s really Earth Week here.

During the week, we’ve hosted a number of activities ranging from an Environmental Wellness Fair featuring green vendors to a company-wide Earth Trek walk/run to sponsoring classes on how to plant a tree. We also observe Earth Day by distributing 1,500 trees to employees for them to plant anywhere they choose.

But truth be told, we want to live as if it’s Earth Day all the time. To make that happen, we try to live Lands’ Friendly at work and at home each and every day.

Green is Good for Employees and the Community

Our corporate campus is more than buildings, parking lots and lawns!

Campus Gardens are Alive and Well

Our employees began growing organic vegetable gardens on the Lands’ End corporate campus in 2009. The sustainable project grew steadily and more than 160 gardeners have participated, using up to 50 available plots. Tomatoes are the most popular plants, but there’s a wide variety of vegetables, native wildflowers and fruit patches such as strawberry, raspberry and rhubarb.

Employees and their families also can tend the company’s "Share Garden," where produce is grown for local food pantries. The community garden generates about 175 pounds of fresh produce in annual donations each year. The gardening season runs from May to October, or about 215 days.

Lands’ End provides supplies to get started – from spades, rakes and hand tools to kneeling pads, wheelbarrows and watering cans – and our employees take it from there. Cafeteria chefs use an herb garden to make their own seasonings and raised flower beds were added so employees can cut flowers for the office or home. Of course, it’s not always about the work of gardening. Employees can visit the garden simply for fresh air, to get gardening tips or to spot the many hummingbirds, butterflies, frogs and toads.

Lands' End Orchard Delivers the Goodies

We have fruit trees, too! Lands’ End added an orchard on its Dodgeville campus in 2012. It has grown to host more than 50 apple, pear and cherry trees, along with 1,000 pumpkin plants. When trees in the orchard produce fruit suitable for picking, employees can take what they want, although truth be told, deer take their share of the apples.

Lands' End makes sure no food goes to waste. Whether it will be offering fruit as a healthy snack to employees or guests or donating it to local food banks, the harvest from the Lands' End Orchard is used every season.

Lands' End Compost Recycles Garden, Orchard Waste into Nutrients for the Soil

Lands' End also gathers materials for a campus compost pile. Fruit that is unsuitable for eating from the orchard joins food scraps and coffee grounds collected from campus cafeterias. Mixed with leaves, grass, and other compostable materials, the compost pile creates rich soil that’s used in Lands' End flowerbeds, the community garden, and other campus projects. Excess compost is made available for employees to use at their homes.

Sustainability is on the Move

Lands’ End has sustainability on its mind when our employees travel.

Parking Perks for Carpooling, Fuel Economy Choices

As more employees purchase vehicles with improved fuel economy, Lands' End rewards them with priority parking on its Dodgeville corporate campus. If the vehicle is rated at or above 40 miles per gallon on the highway, employees can park in a designated spot that’s closer to the building entrance. Employees who carpool also have reserved spots near the entrance. A perk that is worth it, particularly during winter months in Wisconsin.

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

After Lands' End employees inquired about charging electric vehicles, the company installed five charging stations on its Dodgeville campus. Two units are equipped with 220-volt circuits and three have 110-volt circuits. It takes about four hours to get a full charge at the 220-volt charging station.

Bikes Between Buildings

Lands' End is proud to offer its employees 30+ bikes to travel between buildings on the Dodgeville campus. The bike program encourages employees not to use cars, thereby reducing gasoline consumption and related pollution.

Adopt-A-Highway

The Wisconsin Adopt-A-Highway program was initiated to allow employees in Wisconsin to volunteer and support the state's anti-litter program. Twice a year, about 15 employees from the Stevens Point campus don yellow or orange neon vests to clean a two-mile stretch of Wisconsin Highway 66. The Lands’ End program serves as a model for other companies in Wisconsin looking to train their employees to adopt a highway.

The Power to Make a Difference

Lands’ End is committed to proactive power, facility and carbon management to help conserve energy resources.

Energy Management

Lands' End is among a number of leading businesses dedicated to making the case for better internal carbon management, ultimately leading to a more sustainable society. An energy team meets regularly to review and identify energy savings opportunities throughout the year.

Power Management

The company works with lighting contractors to evaluate and propose lighting upgrades in office and production environments for better energy efficiency. When replacing equipment, cost-effective energy solutions are chosen.

• Lands' End's PC management has contributed significantly to energy reduction over the years. Laptop screens are set to first dim and then turn off when idle for designed periods. Additionally, Lands' End implemented network software that idles desktop computers at night and on weekends and deployed a desktop platform that uses thin clients for energy savings.
• Lands' End converted lighting in its distribution center to LED lighting, which uses less electricity than incandescent light bulbs. During remodeling projects on campus, additional LED is regularly implemented.
• Lands' End installed high efficiency lighting in the corporate call center.
• At Lands' End Inlets, store teams have worked to eliminate fluorescent lights and replace them with LED lighting. Sign timers and thermostats in many stores have been replaced with programmable devices.
• "Save Energy" signs hang in campus conference rooms to encourage employees to turn off lights when leaving a room.

Facility Management

• Five Lands' End buildings have been designated "ENERGY STAR" facilities by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These facilities meet strict standards and use less energy, are less expensive and cause fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
• To qualify for the ENERGY STAR rating, a building or manufacturing plant must score in the top 25 percent based on the EPA's National Energy Performance Rating System. To determine the performance of a facility, the EPA compares energy use among other, similar types of facilities on a scale of 1-100. Buildings that achieve a score of 75 or higher may be eligible for the ENERGY STAR. The EPA rating system accounts for differences in operating conditions, regional weather data and other important considerations.
• Lands' End will continue to work toward achieving this coveted rating for all facilities in the US. The Lands' End buildings that are certified include:
• Corporate Office
• Outfitters Embroidery Office
• Warehouse and Distribution Center in Dodgeville
• Call Center, Embroidery, and Warehouse Facility in Stevens Point
• Call Center in Reedsburg
• The Lands' End United Kingdom warehouse became BREEAM certified in 2009 (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method).
• The Lands' End United Kingdom warehouse monitors its power use to reduce the overall kilowatt hours (KWH) for a fiscal year.
• Over a six-year period, the energy saved is equivalent to 4.2 million KWH or nearly $596,000 and prevented 2.27 million tons of CO2 emissions.
• Energy is generated through solar cells on the roof of the building in Lands' End Germany.
• Lands' End opened an environmentally friendly distribution center in Oakham, Rutland in 2010 that increased storage capacity by 200 percent and supports further expansion in the UK and the rest of Europe. The building's green technologies and features include:
• Solar energy to heat the washrooms and the water used within them
• Air source heat pumps to heat the warehouse space
• Gray water capture from the roof to flush toilets
• Reclaimed heat from extracted air used to heat the office area
• "Power shelters" to seal lorries (trucks) to the building, avoiding heat loss through loading bays
• High energy efficiency (T5) lighting throughout with microwave sensors
• Reclaimed stone - 500 tons in total - used for the capping layers under the building's slab
• Super insulation tested by thermal imaging technology and air tightness testing
• All major elements of energy consumption sub-metered and connected to an energy management system to alert energy waste
• Lighting designed to support the "dark skies at night" initiative, minimizing light pollution for local residents and wildlife
• Washrooms fitted with infrared taps to minimize water usage and a central shut off system for when the building is unoccupied
• Wildlife-friendly planting, including wildflowers, introduced around the site
• Site was ranked in the top 10 percent of UK sites under the Considerate Constructors' scheme

A Mission in Process

Lands’ End is working hard to make the company a "zero waste" company.

Zero Waste

Lands' End reuses, recycles or composts between 88 and 90 percent of generated waste from the corporate headquarters, keeping it out of landfills. The goal is to reduce waste completely and make Lands' End a "zero waste" company. The company is dedicated to reaching this goal and will continue to look for ways to compost food scraps, further reduce paper use and refurbish or reuse items for company operations. One item that remains a challenge – logos. The type of lightweight backing paper required to keep a logo in place can't be recycled yet. But we're working on it!

Recycling

Lands' End has a broad range of recycling and waste management initiatives to address paper products, aluminum cans, glass and plastic, as well as printing operations, maintenance operations, disposal of non-recyclables and water management. Efforts are consistently monitored in each of these areas, and the company is constantly looking for areas for improvement.

Recycling and Waste Management

We've had a recycling program since 1992. A year later, we conducted an environmental survey to conduct a full assessment of our recycling capabilities and the recycling program really took off from there!

Here are the company’s most currently available annual recycling numbers:

• 2,843 tons of corrugated cardboard, representing 100% of what’s used
• 201 tons of paper
• 160 tons of plastic bags
• 13.89 tons of electronics

Purchasing Recycled Products

Lands' End continues to maintain an assertive program to buy non-catalog paper products made from recycled materials. Other materials purchased with recycled content include re-charged laser printer cartridges, file folders, paper towels, toilet paper, trash cans, pencils, letter holder trays and brown manila envelopes.

Reducing Waste, Making Old New Again

From refurbishing furniture to reconditioning carpet to donating used computers, Lands' End make a conscious effort to salvage in-house resources.

Equipment

Our waste reduction efforts include utilizing copy output management software to enforce printing rules such as using black/white printing only for emails and replacing aging hardware with more energy-efficient models. Used equipment is donated to organizations or sold to employees.

• The company has donated more than 600 pieces of electronic equipment, including computers and printers, to local schools and other organizations since 2010.
• Employees purchased about 100 used computers in 2016. Funds from the sales are used to recognize employees who volunteer in the community or face a personal need. Employees nominate their co-workers for this program.

Remodeling

One of the company's biggest projects in recent years was to remodel the company call center in Dodgeville. The center is responsible for handling customer orders, comments and questions. During the 2012 remodel, reducing waste was a key goal. To achieve this, Lands' End:

• Replaced old ceiling tiles with new tiles and sent the old ones back to the manufacturer to be recycled.
• Replaced all carpet and sent old carpet back to manufacturer to be used as fuel to heat their building.
• Repainted all trim pieces on furniture and replaced the fabric with new fabric, allowing reuse of the original framework.
• Stripped and replaced old laminate surface, allowing the entire existing work surface to be refaced and reused.
• Replaced all lighting with highly-efficient fixtures that use 30 percent less energy than old fixtures.