By Bruce Japsen
CHICAGO — As the Walgreen Company expands its sales items to fresh salads, Redbox DVD rentals and digital photo scanners, among other products, its consumption of power keeps inching up.
While the company cannot significantly reduce its electricity use in all stores immediately, it is building an experimental “net zero energy store†just north of Chicago that it hopes will produce more energy than it consumes.
The net zero concept is part of the retail giant’s overall sustainability plan to reduce energy use by 20 percent by 2020 across all of its more than 8,000 stores, including Duane Reade stores in the New York area. That goal is also the target of the Department of Energy’s “Better Buildings Challenge†initiative, which President Obama established in 2011 to encourage energy conservation across the country and Walgreen has signed on to.
Published by