How FedEx Falls Short Of Its Standards of Corporate Environmental Responsibility Each Day
I recently had occasion to visit a local FedEx store, and when I was done with my business, I ended up with an extra cardboard box that Spectrum had mailed to me to return the redundant router they had provided (sadly, this means they used 4X resources to get me something I didn’t even need, but I digress). Before heading out, I asked the pleasant woman behind the counter, who had just helped me to also return my super cool, but too-small, Boba Fett t-shirt (keep the awesome designs coming TeeTurtle!) if she could please recycle the superfluous box for me. I found her casual response as surprising as it was disappointing, “I can throw it away for you if you want, but we don’t recycle.”
It was at this moment that I first became aware that FedEx stores seemingly did not participate in a corporate-mandated recycling program. Surely this wasn’t the case though, right? Were it 1983 or something, okay, but in 2024 I found this to be beyond the pale, and so I decided to find out if this was an outlier scenario….
In the two weeks since my disturbing revelation, I have done a significant amount of digging and have spoken to both staffers and managers (on a recorded line) of a great number of FedEx locations around the country. I am disappointed to report that NOT recycling unneeded boxes at the store level is the rule rather than the exception.
The Difficulties Of Attempting To “Be The Change You Want To See In The World”
Armed with this anecdotal evidence, I then set about contacting someone “in the know” at FedEx’s headquarters in Memphis, which turns out to be no easy task. After a fairly discouraging, far-too-involved, and entirely tedious series of phone calls, I managed to get through to the corporate Media & Public Relations department.1 After a long conversation, I came away with my suspicions confirmed. For whatever reason, the FedEx company doesn’t currently have a program in place to guide their store employees when it comes to properly disposing of unneeded cardboard. (Makes one wonder if the company’s 600K employees are absentmindedly tossing their empty bottles and cans in the trash as well.)
Should you care to let these folks know what you think of this non-policy, or if you want to hear from them directly how they justify this stance, their Hotline is 901-434-8100. Ask for Shannon Davis* or Savannah Haeger as both are familiar with this developing issue. You should know going into it that you will probably be ignored once they come to know the reason for your call, however, if my personal experience is an indication anyway.
By this point, I was no longer merely curious, but rather I was on a mission. The emerging picture was one in which this mega-corporation, which states on its website that it has 2,200 stores and handles an average of 16,500,000 packages a day,2 does not now have a store-specific recycling policy of any kind. It is safe to assume this also means that the FedEx Corporation has never had such a thing, unless they rolled it back at some point, which seems unlikely.
And if that weren’t bad enough, it seems that the corporate headquarters also has a “hands-off” policy which serves to compound the problem by resulting in the field locations throwing any empty boxes into the landfill-bound trash by default simply because they are not provided any resources for doing otherwise.
*I will gladly share my email chain with Ms. Davis upon request should anyone picking up this news item be interested in reading how I offered to let this all go away as an oopsie between friends if the leadership team simply agreed to take some form of corrective action. Apparently that suggestion was not as appealing before this post as it likely is now, seeing as how I never heard back from anyone.
Considering my first conversation with her was just before 6:00 PM on the 19th, some cross-section of the corporate team has had a full week to reflect on this matter and get back to me.
It is also worth noting that in my most recent communique (sent 04/24/24 at 3:12 PM) I wrote the following: “I will next write an open letter to the public regarding my exposé on my LinkedIn page. I will tag the FedEx management team in order to ensure they are aware of the Friday deadline [for a reply] I provided you.”
The Disconnect Between FedEx’s Actions & Words
If one consults the company’s 2023 ESG Report, which details its “progress toward our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies, goals, and initiatives and our approach toward industry leadership in ESG to support our strategy and our values,” you will find a number of assertions indicating that this procedural “oversight” stands in stark contrast to official corporate policy.
For example, on one of the fedex.com webpages focused on Sustainability, beneath a headline reading, “Our approach to innovating operations,” is the following:
We actively recycle
• 61% of the solid waste generated in our operations was sent to recyclers3
A quick bit of arithmetic reveals the implication here is that if 1 out of every 1000 packages handled by the shipping giant (a modest estimated .001%) resulted in a superfluous shipping container, then 64,350 perfectly recyclable cardboard boxes end up headed to the dump every single day.
Annualized, this amounts to a whopping 16,409,250 boxes being thrown out by FedEx employees for no good reason.
This calculation is not based on the 365 calendar days in a year, as one might fairly assume,
but rather on the company’s “255 operating days per year” as stated in their website’s
About Us section. (I had no idea they take 110 days off a year. Who knew?)
And yet on the very same webpage upon which they brag about these atrocious numbers, there is much ballyhoo regarding how “Maximizing recycling to conserve resources and reduce waste” and “FedEx-branded cardboard packaging is 100% recyclable and composed of 36% recycled content.” I can only assume that it is up to the customer base to behave responsibly enough to facilitate this fact, but what is sauce for the goose is clearly NOT sauce for the gander.
To make matters even worse still, if one takes this yearly estimate and multiplies it 25x, in order to account for the number of years this waste has likely been flying under the radar, you get 410,231,250 cardboard boxes thrown out. Of course math can be fuzzy when you make a bunch of extrapolations (the company didn’t move as many packages in the past; some of the waste produced cannot be recycled; society wasn’t always as concerned with recycling; etc…), but I think that, all things considered, this projection is probably quite a bit south of the real number.
Leadership Has Apparently Been Unaware Of The Situation, But Not Any Longer
In his “Letter from the CEO” at the beginning of most recent ESG Report4 (dated 2023), FedEx President and CEO, Mr. Raj Subramaniam, writes:
We have always been a company of action, and we remain committed to solving problems by finding solutions that go beyond business and benefit all humanity. … The success of our efforts is built on our sound environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, which are aligned with our company strategic focus. We have reported on our environmental and social impact since 2009 and remain steadfast in transparently sharing our progress in three areas that are central to everything we do—our principles, our planet, and our people.5
Now that the light of truth has been shone on this failing of stated green behaviors, I would like to know what is going to be done about it. If nothing else, perhaps the C-suite will consider issuing a memo instructing their half a million employees to quit trashing boxes that could very well be recycled.
In any event, I am curious to know who among the Powers That Be will have something to say about this unfortunate revelation. I suspect not many of the individuals tagged below6 are likely to weigh in, there’s admittedly little to be gained by doing so, but I am hopeful that among them will be a few who are not as concerned with the company’s past transgressions as they are with coming up with a plan for correcting the problem.
We’ll have to wait and see, dear reader, so stay tuned…
“Media Requests and resources”
https://newsroom.fedex.com/media-requests-and-resources
“Company structure and facts”
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/about/company-structure.html
When I first read that FedEx recycled “61% of the solid waste generated in our operations" I took that to mean of those materials which COULD be recycled. However, upon reflection the 39% differential almost certainly includes things which do you not qualify. This means my numbers are not as accurate as I would intend for them to be. Unfortunately, I do not know how to improve upon them. If anyone at FedEx can assist me such that I can use more appropriate figures, I would welcome the help.
“More paper and packaging facts”
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/sustainability/our-approach.html#:~:text=We%20actively%20recycle.,operations%20was%20sent%20to%20recyclers.
“Environmental, Social, & Governance Reporting”
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/sustainability/reports.html
“Letter from the CEO”
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/sustainability/reports.html
This is a reference to those individuals whom I tagged in the LinkedIn post I created for this piece. (Ideally, there would have been quite a few more stakeholders included, but I hit the limit imposed by Mr. Gates.) They are:
Raj Subramaniam, Jill Brannon, Tracy Brightman, Brie Carere, Rob Carter, John Dietrich, Sriram Krishnasamy, Patrick Moebel, Scott Temple, Brian Philips, Neil Gibson, Jorge Jaramillo, Robin Hicks, Robin Hicks, Tricia Bratton, Tommy Landers, Jacobo (Jake) Hochman, Ted Freeman, Dennis Shirokov, Ed Cabrera, Lex Lannom, Scott Harkins, Norma Suarez, Katherine Boudreau, Allison Prang, Kathryn Lundstrom, Imani Williams, Susan Ellis, Mark Russell, Denisha J. Thomas, Kayla Solomon, Bria Jones, Jenny Robertson, Tom Dees, Jeremy Pierre, Aisling Maki, Bonny Kinney Harrison, Liz McKee