Adidas Tosses Out Plastic Bags In Stores

Adidas plans to put planet before plastic.

The German sports brand said today it pledged to replace plastic shopping bags from all of its own stores, a move pegged to the spirit of Earth Day that could eliminate as many as 70 million shopping bags a year.

The decision is part of the company’s larger mission to become a more sustainable entity.

The plastic-bag reduction effort began a year ago, when Adidas partnered with Parley for the Ocean, a group aiming to curb ocean pollution.

“Phasing out shopping plastic bags is part of our wider effort to constantly increase the use of more sustainable materials in our production, products and stores, as we recently announced with our newly launched 2020 Sustainability Strategy ‘Sport needs a space’,” Roland Auschel, the Adidas executive who runs its global sales, said in a statement today. “However, there is even more to it than that. Our store staff has been trained on the importance of taking consumers on this journey with us; we will therefore ask consumers if they really need a paper bag before we give one away. Reducing the number of bags we produce also means minimizing our environmental footprint and helps us to become an even more sustainable company.”

The Herzogenaurach, Germany-based company will start the switch to paper shopping bags in the U.S. and German immediately, with the initiative rolling out across Russia and Kazakhstan in June.