SUSTAINED COMMITMENT
SUSTAINABILITY UPDATE 2021
INTRODUCTION
Innovation and adaptability have always been priorities at Western Digital. We began as a manufacturer of transistor 
test equipment 50 years ago and have transformed to become a global leader in storage technology, offering the 
world’s broadest portfolio of data storage solutions. Adaptation has been a consistent hallmark of our success.
As we move past a year that will undoubtedly be infamous for its challenges, we are encouraged by the worldwide 
adaptation to those struggles—prompting changes that we hope will have lasting positive impacts. We remain 
committed to supporting the communities, environment and economies on which we all depend and doing our part 
to make sure the future is brighter for everyone.

REPORTING AND MATERIALITY
As a reflection of the increasing importance of sustainability to our business, 
we are adapting our annual sustainability reporting to align with our financial 
reporting. In conjunction with this change, we are publishing an ESG Data 
Download with new sustainability data covering the second half of our fiscal 
year 2020, supplementing the data covering the first fiscal half disclosed in 
our sustainability report published in August. The ESG Data Download also 
includes recent fiscal year-based data that we previously reported for the 
equivalent calendar years. Going forward, we expect to publish our reports 
and the underlying data after the close of our fiscal year.
In this supplemental sustainability report, we share updates from fiscal year 
2020 on a few sustainability topics that are particularly significant to our 
company, as determined in our most recent materiality assessment. We 
continue to manage sustainability issues across the spectrum of materiality 
and look forward to providing a broader update in our next full report.
ENERGY AND EMISSIONS
We are doing more each year to reduce our climate impacts and 
improve our climate resiliency. Even as our product shipments have 
grown, a focus on data and efficiency has helped us achieve notable 
reductions in energy usage and emissions. This focus will only increase, 
as we are currently working to set long-term emissions reduction targets 
and implement TCFD recommendations.
3.8%	
Year-over-year reduction in energy usage
IN FISCAL YEAR 2020, WE ACHIEVED  
THE FOLLOWING MILESTONES:
25%		
Year-over-year reduction in energy intensity
5.2%	
Year-over-year reduction in Scope 1 emissions 
CO2e
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6.3%
Year-over-year reduction in Scope 2 emissions 
CO2e

WASTE AND EFFICIENCY
Western Digital is always looking for opportunities 
to streamline our operations and reduce waste. 
We piloted a new product take-back program on 
Earth Day 2020 called Easy Recycle, which offers 
incentives for consumers to return their products 
for secure data destruction and recycling of the 
materials. In its short tenure so far, that program 
has led to the recycling of 8,300 drives and the 
avoidance of over four metric tons of waste.
We continued our focus on circularity in fiscal year 
2020 by completing our first set of ISO-conformant 
product lifecycle assessments. We are currently 
running additional assessments on other families of 
products and are using that data to further reduce 
the impacts of our production.
Water plays an important role in our manufacturing 
processes, and we made improvements in fiscal 
year 2020 to significantly reduce our water use. At 
our Shanghai facility, we implemented several new 
reclamation projects to achieve a reclamation ratio 
of 95%, the highest in the region. Similar 
reclamation efforts in our Shenzhen facility earned 
recognition from the local government and have 
resulted in conservation of 64 million gallons of 
water annually.
We launched a new Easy 
Recycle product take-back 
program on Earth Day 2020. 
To date, 8,300 drives have been 
recycled and 4+ metric tons of 
waste have been avoided.
Human rights and labor practices were high priorities 
for us during fiscal year 2020. We published our first 
global human rights policy in May, which explains our 
expectations for protecting human rights within our 
own operations as well as our supply chain. The high 
standards set in that policy are based on 
international standards, the industry norms adopted 
by the Responsible Business Alliance and a careful 
analysis of our business.
To continue our focus on human rights, we recently 
launched a human rights impact assessment, 
consistent with the UN Guiding Principles on 
Business and Human Rights. In collaboration with an 
independent firm with human rights expertise, we 
are evaluating potential human rights impacts of our 
business and preparing to use that data to make 
further progress in our management of human rights.
Broad-based diversity and inclusion are important 
aspects of our business strategy, and we are proud 
that as we entered fiscal year 2021, half of the 
members of our Board of Directors were women. We 
joined the Business Coalition for the Equality Act in 
2020, reiterating our commitment to an inclusive 
world. Western Digital was also fortunate to receive 
the Dov Lautmann award for diversity and inclusion 
and, for the seventh year in a row, to achieve the top 
Platinum Plus rating for corporate social 
responsibility from the nonprofit group Maala. 
PEOPLE
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OTHER UPDATES
We are pleased to share a few additional highlights from 
our fiscal year 2020: 
	
▪Western Digital was named one of the 2020 World’s 
Most Ethical Companies by Ethisphere, our second 
year in a row achieving that distinction.
	
▪In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, we quickly 
adopted enhanced health protection measures at our 
factories to protect our workers and allow essential 
work to continue. We also mobilized our operational 
expertise to procure and distribute approximately 
250,000 pieces of personal protective equipment to 
frontline workers in our communities around the world.
	
▪We organized more than $2.7M in employee and 
corporate donations to nonprofit organizations to 
ease the burdens the pandemic placed on access to 
basic resources and services.
	
▪Or manufacturing facility in Shanghai, China received  
a Factory of Choice award from the Responsible 
Business Alliance, a reflection of our commitment to 
embrace or exceed industry standards for integrity 
and sustainability throughout the world.
 
As we see it, sustainability is imperative, both for the world 
and for Western Digital. We intend to remain a leader in 
data storage for decades to come, and that will only 
happen if we protect and support people and our planet. 
That type of sustained prosperity will certainly require 
repeated adaptation, but we are up to the challenge.
©2021 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Western Digital®, architecting how data enables the world to solve its biggest challenges. New 
devices, new systems, new solutions, all optimized and tuned to create the right conditions for data 
to realize its full potential. As a leader in data infrastructure, we accept the responsibility to 
empower people and systems that depend on data. Western Digital’s data-centric solutions are 
comprised of the Western Digital, G-Technology™, SanDisk®, and WD® brands.  
www.westerndigital.com
This Sustainability Update 2021 contains forward-looking statements, which are based on our 
current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to 
differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties 
that could cause actual results to differ include: the COVID-19 pandemic; the regulatory 
environment; supply chain disruptions; business conditions; litigation and other legal proceedings; 
and other risks and uncertainties set forth in our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange 
Commission, to which your attention is directed. You should not place undue reliance on these 
forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof, and we undertake no obligation 
to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. 
Additionally, this update contains metrics that have not been prepared in accordance with U.S. 
generally accepted accounting principles (“GAAP”) and have not been audited. These metrics are 
not an alternative for metrics prepared in accordance with GAAP and may be different from non-
GAAP metrics used by other companies.
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