Beauty.com

taking steps towards sustainability

At drugstore.com our mission is to help people lead healthier, more beautiful lives, and how we fulfill that mission is changing based on what science is revealing about how we affect our environment and vice versa. We call it "going green."

Going green means we're more committed than ever to offering our customers the largest and best selection of natural, "green", environmentally friendly products online. That means we are refining and growing our assortment of these products. Our newly expanded green & natural store will still have your favorite organic and 100% natural health, natural beauty, natural personal care and natural cleaning products, as well as other new products that can help us all live a little "greener".

Going green also means that we are looking closely at how we can do business in a more environmentally friendly way – everything from how we inform you about "green" products, to how we pack your packages, to how we reduce our consumption of energy and resources in our offices and distribution centers.

We know that trying to live more sustainably is an evolving process. Whether it's how you care for yourself, clean your home, or sustain and nourish your family, we hope you'll find products and brands that help you, and help the planet, become healthier and more beautiful.

At drugstore.com we believe that even small steps taken towards healthier living are important ones. The cumulative effect of many small steps makes real progress towards sustainability.

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our involvement

drugstore.com, inc., was founded in 1998 with a clear commitment to providing the best shopping experience for health, beauty and wellness products online. From experience, we know that that commitment goes beyond having a great selection and great prices. It also means providing a quality workplace, for quality employees, and working with quality suppliers. We are continually exploring ways to provide the best and be the best – for our shoppers, our shareholders, our employees, and our communities.

What we are doing
As a strictly online retailer, without stores to operate, our overall footprint is relatively small, but still we are looking at ways to make it even smaller:

At our offices, our company-wide Sustainability Task Force is actively exploring and improving ways we can do better for the environment – in operations, facilities and IT; through recycling, paper, energy and natural resource reduction: providing telecommuting and public transportation options, as well as sustainability education and resources to our employees. We have ongoing paper reduction and recycling campaigns, have stopped buying and using disposable kitchen paper and plastic goods, use only recycled paper.

At our distribution center, we ship with recycled cardboard, and will soon be using only bio-degradable plastic bags, with all-vegetable inks. We save thousands of dollars and trees by choosing not to print and distribute product catalogs. Any printing we do is on recycled paper stock. We have begun to work with our suppliers to develop more ways to reduce packaging overall.

For our communities, we started the drugstore.com Foundation in 1999, which has made nearly a million dollars in donations to a variety of local charitable organizations – chosen by our employee committees. drugstore.com isn't big enough yet to make huge donations or take giant steps, but we believe it's taking the steps that count – even the small ones; whether they are for our own health, our families' and homes, our communities, or our planet. We are proud of our commitment, our effort – and even more excited about what we can do in the future.

These are a few of the ways we can demonstrate our commitment to sustainability. Look for more as we learn more about the opportunities to improve what we do – so we can continue to provide the best health, beauty and wellness shopping online.

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our approach

We hear a lot about "sustainability" these days. It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different folks. Although "green" may be the new nickname for it, sustainability involves much more than the environment.

At drugstore.com our approach to sustainability is based around the concept of the "Triple Bottom Line". That means we take the health or well-being of our community, and our environment, into consideration with our company's business health. A successful business cannot be maintained in the long run, without regarding its own environmental and social responsibilities. Vice versa – a socially responsible, yet financially insecure company is certainly unsustainable in the long term.

We see corporate sustainability as a model for growth that business can sustain – economically, environmentally, and socially. It is business' response to a growing public demand for strategies and practices that address the key issues for the world's sustainable development.

drugstore.com has been committed to helping people around the world lead healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives for nearly a decade, so although sustainability is a daunting goal – taking steps towards it is right in line with our own business mission – for our customers, our employees, and our shareholders.

The most "official", widely accepted definition for sustainability, around the globe, was created in 1987 by the United Nations' World Commission on Environment and Development:

"Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

That works for us too.

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