Sustainability and the UK’s Leading Retailers

This paper provides a review of the sustainability commitments and achievements currently being publicly reported by the UK’s leading retailers and of the nature of the reporting process, and also offers some reflections on the ways these retailers are addressing and pursuing sustainability agendas. The paper begins with a short discussion of the characteristics of sustainability and draws its empirical material from the most recent information on sustainability posted on the top ten UK retailer’s corporate websites. The findings reveal that the top ten UK retailers’ sustainability commitments and achievements embrace a wide range of environmental, social and economic issues but that the reporting process has a number of weaknesses that undermine its transparency and integrity. More critically, the authors argue that these commitments are principally driven by the search for efficiency gains and that they are couched within existing business models centered on continuing growth. Thus, the leading UK retailers are, at best, currently pursuing a “weak” rather than a “strong” model of sustainability; in pursuing continuing growth, they are effectively ignoring the fact the current patterns of consumption may be unsustainable in the long term. The paper provides an accessible review of the sustainability agendas being pursued by the UK’s leading retailers and as such it will interest academics, students and practitioners interested in retailing and corporate sustainability