Home Depot Inc.

Home Depot Inc. is a home improvement retailer based in Atlanta, Georgia. It sells building materials, tools, appliances, fixtures, flooring, garden products, and home improvement services in stores and online. Ted Decker is the CEO of Home Depot. Water conservation matters for Home Depot in its own buildings and in its products.

Home Depot's main water sustainability effort is its focus on selling water-saving products. Rather than just reducing water use in its own stores, the company encourages customers to buy toilets, faucets, irrigation equipment, appliances, and other products that use less water, especially those with the WaterSense label. In 2024, Home Depot offered around 10,900 water-saving products, including about 9,400 with the WaterSense label, and sold over 21 million WaterSense units. These sales helped customers cut their annual water use by about 30 billion gallons, up from nearly 29 billion gallons in 2023. This is the company's most clearly measured water-saving result.

Home Depot's efforts to save water in its own stores are smaller but still important. The company uses leak detection systems to spot water waste quickly, smart irrigation systems that adjust watering based on sensors and weather, water tanks to collect rain for garden centers, local plants that need less water, and dual-flush toilets in restrooms. The most specific result is from smart irrigation: stores with these systems have cut landscaping water use by 29% on average compared to older timer-based systems, and more than 500 U.S. stores have used this program since 2019.

Home Depot connects water conservation to product safety by encouraging suppliers to use safer chemicals. Its flooring policies require third-party transparency for carpets, no added ortho-phthalates in vinyl flooring since 2016, and stricter limits on formaldehyde in laminate flooring. Through these efforts to reduce chemical risks throughout the supply chain, water quality improves. However, the report does not show any direct results for water quality from these efforts.

Another shortfall is the lack of information Home Depot shares. The company provides a strong estimate of how much water its customers save, but it does not report basic numbers such as water withdrawn, water used, water use per store, or water use in areas with water shortages. This is true even though its ESG reports follow frameworks like GRI, SASB, and TCFD. As a result, it is hard to know the company's own water impact.