Dollar General highlights tree-planting partnership, 848 acres restored since 2020

Dollar General is using Earth Day to put a number on a partnership that store teams can actually point to: more than 848 acres of forest restored and more than 434,000 tree plantings across the United States and Mexico since the company began working with the Arbor Day Foundation five years ago.

The company said it planted more than 137,500 trees in fiscal 2025 alone. For associates, district leaders and managers who are often asked what Dollar General does beyond running stores, the message is straightforward: the company wants its public identity tied to stewardship and community impact, not just sales and expansion. That matters in rural towns and suburban markets where shoppers, landlords, schools and civic leaders increasingly judge whether a retailer is investing in the place where it operates.

Dollar General’s fiscal 2025 corporate social responsibility report said the company provided access to more than 20,800 stores across 48 U.S. states and five cities in Mexico, and said its actions are driven by its purpose of Serving Others. The company’s environmental policy says it aims to reduce its environmental footprint while balancing operational and customer needs, monitor Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse-gas emissions, expand renewable energy use and improve recycling, repurposing, reusing or reducing materials. Board-level oversight sits with the Nominating, Governance & Corporate Responsibility Committee, while a management Sustainability Committee meets at least quarterly.

The Arbor Day partnership began in May 2021 with a $100,000 donation aimed at planting more than 20,000 trees. At the time, Dollar General said the work would support projects in Florida, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, along with employee volunteer tree-planting days in Nashville, Minneapolis, Albuquerque and Durham. The company also points to its cardboard backhauling program, which began in 2008 and, it said, has saved the equivalent of nearly 35 million trees through more than two million tons of recycled cardboard.

Recent projects give the effort more local detail. In Nashville, Dollar General and CHEP USA worked with the Arbor Day Foundation to restore tree canopy damaged by Winter Storm Fern in January 2026, tying that work to Root Nashville’s goal of planting 500,000 trees across Davidson County by 2050. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the company previously joined the Arbor Day Foundation and Operation PRIDE after the December 2021 tornadoes. In Mexico City, Dollar General said it supported monarch butterfly habitat restoration on the outskirts of the city in 2024 and planted 12,500 trees in 2025. It also helped give away 250 trees at Greynolds Park in Miami-Dade County in December 2024. Dollar General was also recently named to USA Today and Statista’s America’s Climate Leaders 2026 list, underscoring how it wants its environmental record to be read alongside its larger retail footprint.