Last week the Retail Industry Leaders Association had their annual environmental sustainability conference in San Diego. The conference was excellent and there were some really great sessions from leading brands, retailers and service providers. We heard an update from Walmart and Best Buy on the progress of the Sustainability Consortium, and through presentations and individual conversations with attendees, learned about many of the challenges retailers are facing.

Nearly every retailer has begun doing something in terms of improving their sustainability. Generally, they include efforts around their store footprint and the built environment: reduce waste, energy, greenhouse gas emissions, etc …  And while these early efforts should be commended, most activity to date is centered on large visions that will take five or 10 years before a verdict is in on their success.

There are many things retailers can do now that will lead to quick wins in terms of reducing their footprint, engaging employees and their organization in sustainability and demonstrating how sustainability can be used to improve financial performance.

One major challenge retail sustainability executives face is that they need to get buy-in from other parts of their organization in order to make anything happen. And in an increasingly competitive market, buy-in for sustainability activities will not occur unless you can show results that cut costs or increase revenue. As such, here are three ways to integrate sustainability for retailers that will not only improve environmental performance, but also financial performance.

1.  Integrate Sustainability for Your Buyers

While a large part of a retailer's footprint is the built environment, arguably an even larger part is the millions of products they sell every day. So what better way to impact sustainability within the retail environment than to focus on the products that are going on store shelves? A key starting point is to identify just a few critical sustainability hotspots within product categories and educate the buyers about these sustainability issues so that they can talk to their vendors about them.

However, the key to integrating sustainability into the buying organization is not to solely tout the sustainability impacts this will have, as the results are likely to be largely intangible. Moreover, the buyers are already extremely preoccupied with reducing costs, improving quality, and ensuring availability.  The key is to tie sustainability to the goals that buyers already have and to show how incorporating sustainability can actually help them achieve their goals. For instance, strategies such as packaging reductions or developing more concentrated product formulations can help reduce costs and staying on top of consumer risk factors like heavy metals in toys and jewelry, BPA in plastics or melamine in food can help reduce risk of lost category sales.