Walgreen Co. – Wyatt Williams – 2023

Goals

Wyatt was tasked with developing a scalable strategy for capturing and reporting waste and emissions data related to the design and delivery of capital construction projects, along with ways this data might be used in support of established corporate goals of 30% emissions reduction and 5% reduction of waste to landfills.

Wyatt was tasked with delivering these data collection strategies, along with related tools, goals, and strategies in collaboration with Walgreen’s construction and ESG teams.  

Solutions

Informed by his solid waste consulting background and graduate research, Wyatt collaborated with Walgreens Standards, Construction and ESG teams to create tools to measure capital construction processes’ emissions and waste generation across varied construction delivery models and store formats. These included an embodied carbon model, a waste characterization sheet, and an emission tracking form.

He then established specific baselines for Walgreens’s stores and construction processes based on data-gathering pilot programs and researched other retail peers’ tracking and reduction programs to identify successful models and best practices.

Informed by those efforts, Wyatt developed a scalable construction waste and emission reduction strategy and proposed goals to achieve a 50% reduction in construction emissions, and waste generation by 2030 and net zero stores and zero waste in the long term.

Potential Impact

The waste characterization and generation reporting tool tracked 100% of waste streams in two remodel pilot projects and helped the construction team to identify an opportunity to realize up to a 30% landfill diversion that could be adopted and expanded across a wider range of projects and potentially achieve zero waste to landfill through reuse and recycling through continued use of the reporting tool. Separately, the embodied carbon tool allows sustainable material substitution while comparing sustainability, cost, and performance metrics.