| Ron Jarvis is out in front of The Home Depot’s most ambitious sustainability pledge to date: a plan to drastically cut emissions from its outdoor lawn equipment, the biggest contributor to the company's carbon footprint. The company announced a plan last month to have more than 85 percent of its sales of lawn mowers, leaf blowers and trimmers run on rechargeable batteries instead of gas by the end of fiscal year 2028 — a move it estimates will reduce more than 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually. It comes as California is set to implement a ban on gas-powered landscaping equipment starting next year. Now Jarvis, Home Depot’s chief sustainability officer, has to figure out how to execute the plan — and sell it to the general public. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How long has this announcement been in the works? We've been working with our suppliers to bring battery-operated lawn maintenance equipment in for about 10 years. And as that process evolved, and the technology got better, today when you buy an electric mower and you push it into the weeds and the dandelions and everything else, it rips it apart and leaves a beautiful trail behind it, just like the gas-powered does. So we wanted to get to that type of technology before we moved forward with rolling this out. We've probably been working for about a year and a half on how quickly can we transition this industry and how fast can we and should we move on this. We're pretty excited. We see the transition party happening in many, many markets. We see the technology being there. A lot of times when consumers move from a product to an environmentally friendlier product, they feel like they're taking a step backwards — it doesn't work as well, it doesn't last as long. There's usually some give-and-take with that. But we found with these products that they're just as powerful. They have just as much torque. They do the jobs in the adequate time that's needed for the batteries. And customers aren't giving up anything. They're gaining. They're gaining a quieter, cleaner, greener yard and helping the environment through the whole process. How does this announcement help you from a business perspective? We will have customers coming in demanding electric and battery-operated lawn equipment. So we've done a lot to educate the customers, we've done a lot to make sure that the products are worthy of them making the transition. This isn't incremental business. We're not bringing in a new line of widgets that’s incremental sales. This is replacing sales. But what we do know and what we do think is to our advantage is to be a leader and to get ahead of this. If we think that American yards need battery-operated mowers, then let's do it for them. Let's not have the customer stand in the aisle and have to choose between “Do I want to do something good for the environment or something good for my wallet?” So now we have opening price points. We have price points that are equal to the gas-powered. And when you look at the long-term maintenance of the products, when you're not buying gas every week, you don't have to buy the oil spark plugs, you don't have those issues with battery-operated engines. What role is policy playing in this announcement, if any? Have policies like California’s ban on gas-powered lawn equipment nudged you in this direction? No, it hasn't nudged us. We were headed down this path long before any policy came out. We're putting this in the markets where there is no policy or legislation. We think it's the right thing to do. And we would have done it even if there wasn't policy or legislation.
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