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Sustainability
Our position
The retail industry supports nationally-consistent legislation and initiatives which produce real environmental outcomes, while minimising negative impact on businesses and citizens.
Many retailers have been proactive in improving their environmental footprint for many years, providing consumers with access to more sustainable alternatives, in-store recycling, ethical sourcing, and company-wide sustainability policies.
The majority of retailers strongly support sustainable initiatives, but it is a complex and sometimes overwhelming challenge as we are faced with ever-evolving and conflicting research and regulations.
The National Retail Association is active across all areas of sustainability, representing whole-of-industry insight, educating businesses, and ultimately encouraging national consistency to accelerate environmental outcomes.
The NRA supports positive initiatives to improve environmental impact across the retail industry, however these changes must be:
- nationally consistent
- fair for all retailers regardless of size
- carefully considered and evidence-based
- commercially viable and realistic in a global market
- supported by retailer & consumer education
- supported by investment in Australian innovation & infrastructure
What we do
The National Retail Association Policy Team exists to help retail businesses succeed and grow within an ever-changing regulatory environment.
Our team works with a wide range of industry stakeholders – retailers, government, law enforcement, regulatory bodies, shopping centres, community groups, supporting associations and many more – to develop industry-wide policy platforms or positions on issues of importance to the Australian retail sector.
We work with all retailers across the retail and foodservice industry – regardless of size, category or business model – from the largest department chains to family-run pizza shops. Similar issues affect all retailers every day – such as retail crime, product safety and environmental legislation – and we all benefit from sharing intelligence and real-world experience.
We work actively with governments at international, federal, state and local levels to ensure the interests and needs of the Australian retail and services sectors are protected and promoted. Rather than running from inevitable regulatory change, we provide a bridge between retailers and government – facilitating the exchange of ideas and information which ultimately leads to more informed, commercially-aware outcomes for all parties.
We place real-world insight above all else, so we actively engage with retailers in stores, strip precincts and shopping centres.
We tackle the issues you can’t tackle alone.