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This Earth Day, Retail Business Services – the services company of Ahold Delhaize USA – is celebrating the importance of sustainability. In line with new sustainability goals, Retail Business Services is focused on decreasing single-use plastics, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, increasing energy efficiency and investing in renewable energy sources, all while bringing health and sustainability to life in our business every day.

The 2020 RBS Cares Virtual Day of Service "Caring Together While Apart" toolkit encouraged associates to safely serve their communities with focus on outdoor clean up and beautification. Of 300 associate participants, many devoted their three-hour service shift to collecting and recycling trash in local parks, roads and neighborhoods.

Supporting Ahold Delhaize USA’s sustainability goals, the Not for Resale (NFR)/Indirect Sourcing team is working with all brands to transition from rigid, black plastics to flexible-bag packaging for certain in-store programs. To date, this program has reduced more than 500 metric tons of plastics. NFR is also actively identifying sustainable options to replace polystyrene trays in Fresh departments in alignment with Ahold Delhaize USA’s 2025 goal to reduce overall use of problematic single use plastics. Additionally, Ahold Delhaize USA and its local brands are signatories to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastics Economy Global Commitment to eliminate problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging and move from single-use to reusable options.

Dovetailing with the commitment’s new greenhouse emissions goals, Retail Business Services’ Energy team continued making headway on ongoing projects to install LED lighting and improved sealing doors on temperature-controlled cases.

“These are major initiatives for the Retail Business Services Energy team, and there’s still room to continue that work despite the pandemic,” said Andrew Fernandez, Director of Energy. “The field teams doing the installs on these projects worked really, really hard to do work within state guidelines – stopping work, picking it back up, scheduling around retail hours – to get everything done on time. “It was vital that we continue these installs because the savings and the environmental impacts from these projects build on each other from year, over year, over year.”

In 2020, the Energy team helped complete more than 150 projects across the local brands, where many of the new energy-saving features have become the norm.

“It’s accepted practice at some of the brands,” said Wayne Rosa, Maintenance Director. “So, during remodels and special projects, you’ll see a lot of those items folded into the remodels themselves. It’s not just an energy project that we’re rolling out, it’s a culture that these brands have deployed and now it’s the way of doing business going forward.”

Retail Business Services also invests in several community solar programs, which support local solar development in communities surrounding stores, distribution centers and support offices, all while helping lower costs.

“In that way we’re able to incentivize a lot of solar that’s been developed,” said Andrew. “By the time these projects are completed we will have anchored over 200 megawatts of solar which is a very large addition to the grid in the New England and New York areas.”