The Timberland Company issued its third corporate social responsibility (CSR) report highlighting the company's CSR priorities, programs, progress and challenges related to global human rights, environmental stewardship, community involvement, and employee engagement. The report, which is based on the standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), also includes the names and locations of more than 160 active contract factories that making Timberland products worldwide.

“It's been several years since Timberland last reported publicly on our activities and efforts to be a good corporate citizen,” said Jeffrey B. Swartz, Timberland's president and CEO. “That is not to say that we haven't tried to produce a CSR report since that time. In fact, we've started several. But each time, we ultimately decided that it wasn't enough. There were too many holes, too many questions and not enough concrete, tangible, reliable information to share. And, in this age of too many voices and not enough time to listen, we felt it best not to add one more voice to the conversation unnecessarily.”

“We are very excited to share with you Timberland's third CSR report. Inside, you'll find a lot of what you'd expect – updates on the work we are doing to strengthen communities, protect our environment and improve global labor standards as well as recognition that while we are making progress, there is still a lot of work ahead of us. We also hope you will find things you'd not expect, such as comprehensive GRI-based reporting that measures Timberland's policies and practices against this independent multi-stakeholder institution's expectations and detailed information on how we plan to make our best efforts even better going forward.”

Report Highlights

Timberland's report relies heavily on the guidelines issued by the GRI and primarily covers the 2004 calendar year. Highlights include:

  • Timberland's 2004 audits of 94% of its contract factory base identified health and safety, compensation and fair and equal treatment as the three most frequent areas where infractions of its Code of Conduct occurred. Because of our concern with both the frequency of code infractions and the challenges of understanding root causes of these infractions, the Company rolled out a new assessment process in 2005 that includes standardized root cause analyses, factory risk assessments and identification and sharing of leading practices throughout our contract supplier base.
  • Timberland has made significant progress in reducing our contributions to climate change that include lighting retrofits in our U.S. distribution centers to simultaneously improve lighting quality while reducing energy use by nearly 40%; the installation of sleep mode software on computer monitors to reduce global electricity usage by more than 237,000 kilowatt hours; and the use of U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental standards in all new specialty store construction.
  • Timberland continued to demonstrate its commitment to citizen service through its Path of Service program. Through this program, Timberland employees served more than 55,000 hours globally, engaging nearly 8,500 consumers and partners in 27 countries.