sustainability report

sustainability committee Chairman’s message

For the first time this year, Woolworths is producing a sustainability report as a standalone document alongside the annual report, enabling us to offer this document without the annual financial statements, to interested stakeholders. This report provides a detailed overview of the sustainability initiatives of the business and, where possible, supporting measurements.

management framework

We reported last year that we would embark on a journey to create a strategic business-wide framework – the Woolworths Sustainability Index – an index tailored specifically to deal with the issues that most impact our business.

The index has been created through a series of workshops and one-on-one meetings with key stakeholders within Woolworths enabling us to interpret issues and agree policies and targets at business unit level. We will be measuring Woolworths progress towards a more sustainable business using more than 150 indicators or measures across the business.

Summaries of our indicators, ranked according to sustainability impact – high, medium or low – have been produced and will be available on www.woolworthsholdings.co.za, providing interested stakeholders with a deeper insight into Woolworths commitment to sustainability.

Supporting documentation for the Woolworths Sustainability Index is held internally in a series of data worksheets that are maintained at business unit level, tracking performance against each indicator and the related target.

reporting framework

We said we would report against the Woolworths Sustainability Index once it was complete. The first draft of the index is complete and we have portrayed a slightly different format to this year’s report, reflecting the structure of the Woolworths index. The report seeks to summarise the detail of the index and, as noted earlier, interested stakeholders should refer to our website for further detail. Where relevant, the indicators as described in this report reflect a rating – this rating describes the priority of this indicator for the business and the expected level of activity for this indicator over the next year, for example BEE is described as:

Indicating the importance of BEE to the business and the focus this factor will receive over the next year.

It is expected that the sustainability report will be read in conjunction with Woolworths annual report and most repetition between the two reports has been eliminated by cross-referencing. The Woolworths index is referenced to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and, as we have done for the past 2 years, we have included a cross-check against this framework in this document.

We expected to be able to include some verification of the Woolworths Sustainability Index by our internal audit team. It was not possible to implement this in the past year but, where the data is audited either internally or externally, we have noted the detail within the Woolworths Sustainability Index source data.

Once again, the information in this report relates mainly to our South African business, which accounts for more than 95% of our turnover. This year, Country Road, our Australian subsidiary, reviewed their sustainability practises.

key projects

The focus of the 2006 year from a corporate sustainability perspective has been the development of the Woolworths Sustainability Index but there have been some unique efforts within the business that we would like to highlight:

  • the development of our distribution centre in Midrand Gauteng is being scrutinised from a sustainability perspective at every turn and the sustainable building guidelines and other practises that we adhere to have been stretched and tested – detailed feedback on this development is contained here;
  • the MySchool and EduPlant programmes continue to make a meaningful difference in the lives of many school children, both in terms of funding through financial contributions on behalf of our customers and through the MySchool learning modules;
  • Woolworths understanding of BEE in the past year has deepened, with a greater awareness of broad based BEE throughout the business. Woolworths awaits the publication of the final BEE codes to provide additional guidance for the implementation of broad based black economic empowerment at all levels in the business; and
  • Woolworths sustainability report was recognised as the most improved sustainability report in the ACCA South Africa sustainability awards, with particular mention of the effort put into providing more measurement for sustainability initiatives within the business.

The highlight of our sustainability year was being recognised as the top company in the medium impact classification of the JSE’s Socially Responsible Investment Index. The challenge for the year ahead is to maintain a rating in the upper quartile of this benchmarking index.

2007 focus

Maintaining the Woolworths Sustainability Index and meeting or exceeding targets set will be the key focus for 2007. In addition to this ongoing sustainability drive, we have identified 3 key projects for this year: waste, energy and water. These focus areas affect our business and our consumers deeply at every level – from the source of our product to the disposal of consumer waste. Each of these projects will have individually scoped terms of reference and clearly defined outcomes. Progress in these projects will be reported in detail in the 2007 report.

I am encouraged by the substantial progress that has been made in understanding sustainability at Woolworths and am confident that the new strategic framework and the increased attention to sustainability issues within the business will continue to drive Woolworths to take a leadership stance on many of the sustainability initiatives facing retailers, both in South Africa and internationally.


Brian Frost

Chairman of the Sustainability forum &
Independent non-executive director

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