Sustainable Development and the UK's Major Retailers

This article reviews the ways, and the extent to which, the UK's leading retailers are contributing to sustainable development. An outline of sustainable development, seen as part of the wider business community's commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agendas, and a brief review of the dynamic and increasingly concentrated nature of retail provision, provide a platform for an examination of the ways in which the top ten UK owned retailers are addressing sustainable development. This examination, which draws its empirical material from the company's CSR reports posted on the World Wide Web, reveals that the retailers claim not only to be addressing a number of the impacts that their businesses have on the environment, the economy and society but also to be integrating sustainability and CSR into their core business. However, as the article recognises, many of these claims are contested and while sustainability is now becoming an increasingly important issue for retailers, their policies often seem selective and primarily business driven.