Think about the last tool you bought. You tore open the packaging, grabbed what you needed and pitched the rest without a second thought.
That packaging adds up fast, and most of the plastic protecting products on store shelves can’t be recycled. It just ends up in a landfill.
Our Commitment to Reducing Plastic Waste
The Home Depot has been chipping away at that problem for years. We started by pulling hard-to-recycle materials like expanded polystyrene (EPS) out of our own packaging. Now we’re pushing further, looking for ways to cut plastic from the packaging and the products themselves, and one of the best ways to do that is by working directly with our suppliers.
An Example: DEWALT
DEWALT, owned by Stanley Black & Decker, is one supplier doing exactly that. The company has spent years redesigning how its brands get packaged, trading hard-to-recycle plastic for materials that are easier on the planet. For the tools you buy at The Home Depot, that means the same performance you count on, just packaged smarter.
Starting with the Biggest Opportunity
A supplier making hundreds of thousands of products can’t overhaul everything overnight. So, DEWALT started where it would matter most: the high-volume products wrapped in plastic that recycling plants simply can’t handle.
That plastic is PVC, the rigid, clear clamshell packaging you’ve seen hanging on store pegs for years. Most municipal recycling programs aren’t set up to process it, so once it’s thrown away, it stays that way. DEWALT targeted PVC first, swapping it for paperboard and corrugated cardboard wherever it could. Since 2021, such efforts have kept roughly 2.2 million pounds* of plastic from Stanley Black & Decker products out of landfills.
Why Some Plastics Matter More than Others
Not all plastic causes the same amount of damage. DEWALT went after the materials with no real second life, plastics like PVC that recycling facilities can’t process at all. Instead of treating every material the same, the company focused where it could do the most good.
That’s circularity in practice: designing products and packaging so the materials can come back around instead of piling up in a landfill. It’s exactly the kind of supplier partnership The Home Depot wants to keep building.
A Win You Can Hold: DEWALT Batteries
The best example is the DEWALT battery lineup. Between 2023 and 2025, DEWALT moved its batteries out of PVC clamshells and into printed corrugated cartons, stripping plastic out of the packaging across the board.
For batteries sold at The Home Depot alone, that one change cut more than 180,000 pounds of plastic, close to 8 million 16.9 fl. oz. water bottles. It’s the biggest packaging win in the portfolio, and you can find it on shelves right now: More than 60 DEWALT battery products carry the redesigned packaging in-store and online.
The Story Started with a Tape Measure
The battery redesign wasn’t the first attempt. Years earlier, DEWALT learned the same lesson with a much smaller product: the tape measure. It was one of the company’s first sustainable packaging projects, trading traditional plastic for a design built mostly from recycled cardboard. It didn’t cut out plastic completely, but it proved the idea could work without changing how the product looked or performed on the shelf. We covered this project in more depth in A World with Less Plastic Pollution Is Possible.
The chalk reel took a similar path. Both the tape measure and the chalk reel combo kits sold at The Home Depot now ship mostly in corrugated and paperboard packaging instead of PVC. Together, the tape measure and chalk reel showed the approach could scale beyond one product, setting up the much bigger battery conversion.
Choosing Products that Do More
The next time you grab a DEWALT battery or tape measure at The Home Depot, that packaging is proof of what The Home Depot and DEWALT have built together. Choosing brands that back up their claims with real material changes is one of the easiest ways to cut down on plastic waste, and multiplied across millions of shoppers, those small choices add up fast. It’s one more reason to reach for the DEWALT tools already doing the work.
*The 2.2 million-pound figure reflects the one-time annualized benefit of packaging changes made during the year across Stanley Black & Decker brands, based on the reduction in plastic per package and expected yearly volume. Each initiative is counted only once, at the point of implementation.
