NLPC presented a shareholder proposal today at the annual meeting of The Home Depot, Inc. that asked the company to revisit its plastics packaging policies, to implement serious scientific and economic analyses instead of following environmental alarmist agenda priorities.
The company’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on page 34 of its proxy statement. NLPC responded to the board’s opposition statement in an exempt solicitation report circulated to the company’s shareholders. The report also opposed an anti-plastics proposal sponsored by liberal shareholder group As You Sow.
Presenting the proposal at the meeting was Paul Chesser, director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. An audio recording of his presentation can be found here, and a transcript of his three-minute remarks follows:
I’m Paul Chesser of the National Legal and Policy Center.
Home Depot commits to requiring its suppliers to reduce or convert 200 million pounds of plastic used in products to recycled or alternative materials by the end of 2028.
That sounds like environmental leadership.
But every cost of that conversion — like higher prices for recycled resin over virgin resin, product redesign expenses, and supply chain inefficiencies — gets embedded in what suppliers charge the Company for the products on its shelves.
The Company’s own sustainability disclosures acknowledge that sourcing recycled content requires expanding supply chains, which is an admission that the materials required are expensive and scarce.
Shareholders are absorbing these costs without being shown a rigorous, independent analysis of whether they are justified.
The peer-reviewed science says they probably are not.
A 2024 analysis in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, which examined 53 lifecycle studies across 16 product categories, found that plastic produces fewer polluting emissions than its alternatives in 15 of those 16 categories.
Replacing plastic with heavier paper, glass, or composite alternatives — which is exactly what Home Depot’s mandate drives — adds weight per shipment, increases transportation emissions, and raises costs.
The recycling infrastructure that would make these commitments meaningful does not exist at the scale required, either.
California — with the most activist regulatory environment and the most ambitious plastics law on the books — recycles most plastics at rates in only the single digits.
And there is also a legal dimension the Board has not addressed.
Home Depot is a member of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition — one of three organizations that a ten-state coalition of attorneys general warned the last couple years may be violating federal antitrust law through coordinated packaging standards.
The Board’s opposition to our proposal does not mention this exposure for shareholders.
Our proposal asks for a scientifically independent, objective, and quantifiable evaluation of whether these policies actually serve shareholders.
It is the analysis the Board should have done before making the commitments it asks suppliers and shareholders to live with.
We urge shareholders to vote FOR Item 6.
Thank you.
All assertions made by Chesser in his above remarks are footnoted and can be found in NLPC’s exempt solicitation report, here. An executive summary of the report can be viewed here.
Read NLPC’s shareholder proposal for the Home Depot annual meeting here.
Listen to Chesser’s presentation of the proposal at the meeting here.
