• Overall We were named the Best Company on Earth by the Better World Shopping Guide!
• Sustainability in our Supply Chain To help us articulate our expectations around sustainability, we held our first ever Manufacturing Partner Sustainability Summit and completed our first full round of comprehensive audits of our manufacturing partners. We’re pleased to see the significant — and deepening — commitment to robust environmental and social practices within our supply chain.
• Product Design We introduced revolutionary new Fabric Softener Sheets, Rinse Aid, and Auto Dish Pacs; eliminated synthetic fragrances in all of our products; and made additional product improvements.
• Retail Partners Almost 40,000 people attended our GIVE trainings to learn about Seventh Generation and the benefits of natural products.
• Sourcing/ Palm Oil We are the first North American home care products company to purchase sustainable palm oil credits (in early 2009) and we joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil to participate in efforts to improve the sustainability of the global supply.
• Consumers We improved our outreach capabilities, doubling the traffic to our redesigned website and adding 10,000 members to our 7Gen Nation each month. More significantly, we are successfully fostering a deeper level of engagement and discussion — not just about our products and philosophy — but about our collective efforts to change the world.
• Carbon Footprint/Transportation We pursued a decentralized manufacturing and distribution scheme by adding three new manufacturing facilities and making plans to increase to five distribution centers. Minimizing transit time through strategically located suppliers and warehouses will allow us to reduce delivery miles to our retailers by 48% in 2009 thus lowering our greenhouse gas emissions as well as our costs.
• Ingredient Disclosure We think consumers have a right to know what’s in the products they buy and a right to understand what the words on product labels mean. To support this belief, we greatly increased the information available on our own labels and developed a downloadable Label Reading Guide (www.labelreadingguide.com) so shoppers can click through a dictionary of terms found on cleaning product labels — right from the store aisle. We also provided significant support for the Soap and Detergent Association’s groundbreaking ingredient disclosure initiative and applaud the ten companies (representing 90% of the products in this category) who have agreed to disclose their ingredients for the first time.

Longer Term Goals:

While we’re in the midst of defining sustainability goals for our company and for each of our departments, there are some long-term goals that serve as the underpinnings for all that we do. We seek to:

• transform the purpose and promise of business in our society
• improve the life cycle sustainability of our products and our supply chain
• achieve a paradigm shift in our packaging to dramatically improve sustainability
• continue to serve as a resource for our consumers in their pursuit of more sustainable lives
• shift public policy on climate change

In 2008, the sale of Seventh Generation products helped save:

• 140,000 trees 1,200 acres filled with trees
• 50,400,000 gallons of water enough to supply 400 families for a year
• 191 billion BTUs of energy a year’s worth of energy for 1,900 households
• 1,420,000 gallons of petroleum equivalent to taking 2,400 cars off the road for a year

Livia Frossard And also great to see that they are really opened to integrate stakeholders not only in the beginning of the reporting process, but also in the publication, showing that it's a true ongoing process. And the best practices book is a great idea. Two-thumbs up! 18 August 2009

Kevin Long Glad to see a leader of Jeffrey's stature willing to be critical of an industry that needs to evolve dramatically to address the challenge's we face today. 12 August 2009