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Supermarket group Tesco, which pumps out some four million tonnes of carbon a year, today opened its first zero carbon store as part of its bid to be a carbon ­neutral company by 2050.

The shop, in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, is timber-framed rather than steel, and uses skylights and sun pipes to cut lighting costs. It also has a combined heat and power plant powered by renewable bio-fuels, exporting extra electricity back to the national grid. In addition the refrigerators – one of the biggest blackspots for food retailers trumpeting their green credentials – have doors to save energy and harmful HFC refrigerant gases have been replaced.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/feb/02/tesco-carbon-neutral-green-building

Despite numerous warnings about the crisis of unsustainable seafood, leading US supermarkets are still failing to raise their standards.

According to the Greenpeace seafood sustainability scorecard, released today, only Whole Foods, Ahold USA, Target, and Harris Teeter have acceptable seafood practices.

The leading 20 supermarket chains continue to stock endangered seafood such as orange roughy, swordfish, and Chilean sea bass. Read more

Source: Green Biz

The first shipment of palm oil certified as environmentally sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is on its way from the rainforests of Malaysia to the UK this week, where it will eventually end up on the shelves of Sainsbury’s supermarkets.

Last year, the trade group launched a certification scheme designed to allow palm oil producers to prove their crops have come from legal and environmentally sustainable plantations that have not contributed to rainforest clearance.

The scheme has won significant support from both plantation operators and palm oil purchasers – including Tesco, Nestle, Sainsbury’s and Unilever, all of which have signed up to join the RSPO – who have faced criticism from green groups for indirectly supporting illegal plantations that result in the destruction of rainforest in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Read more

Source: Business Green

Editor Note: But Greenpeace has its doubts. I would as well.

The battle between the world’s leading retailers to deliver the deepest cuts in plastic bag use intensified last week when supermarket giant Wal-Mart announced it is to cut plastic shopping bag waste from its stores globally by a third by 2013.

The company, which owns Asda in the UK, said that the move would eliminate more than 135 million lbs of plastic waste a year, cut CO2 emissions by 290,000 tonnes and slash energy consumption to the equivalent of 678,000 barrels of oil.

Announcing the target at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York, Matt Kistler, senior vice president for sustainability of Wal-Mart Stores, said that the company would seek to change its customers’ behaviour by reducing the number of plastic bags it hands out, cutting the cost of reusable bags, and increasing the availability of recycling points. Read more

Source: Business Green

The unofficial race between the UK’s leading supermarkets to see who can save the most plastic bags stepped up a gear yesterday after Tesco claimed it has reduced the number of single use carrier bags distributed over the last two years by two billion.

The company said that since the launch in August 2006 of its scheme for offering customers points on their Tesco reward cards if they use their own bags monthly bag use has fallen by 40 per cent to 200m bags.

Lucy Neville-Rolfe, corporate and legal affairs director at Tesco, said that the rate at which customers were turning away from plastic bags was accelerating. “It took more than 14 months to save the first billion bags but the second billion was achieved in less than nine months, showing that the trend is rapidly gaining support,” she said.

Tesco maintained that the figures were also evidence that its approach of incentivising people to reduce plastic bag use was working. In a thinly, veiled swipe at government plans for a possible tax on single use carrier bags, Neville-Rolfe said that the company had helped customers cut bag use by 40 per cent “without a bag tax adding to the cost of their weekly shop”. Read more

Source: Business Green

Companies behind some of the biggest brands on UK supermarket shelves have pledged to slash the environmental impact of transporting their goods.

About 40 food and drink companies have signed up to the Food and Drink Federation’s (FDF) Environmental Checklist and Clause for Greener Food Transport.

The companies, which include Cadbury Schweppes, Weetabix Ltd and Premier Foods – the company behind Hovis bread and Branston pickle – committed to using a 10-point checklist to reduce the number and impact of food miles.

Maximising vehicle loading, reducing the amount of journeys made without any freight, and using rail and shipping instead of road freight are among the recommendations on the checklist.

The FDF said it will help companies contribute to an industry target to reduce the environmental impact of domestic food transport by 20% by 2012, compared to 2002 levels. Read more

Source: Edie News

A row has broken out today between local councils and leading retailers with both sides accusing the other of not doing enough to accelerate UK recycling rates.

The argument was sparked by the latest survey from the Local Government Association (LGA) into the weight and recyclability of packaging, which found that despite high-profile commitments to curb packaging levels, supermarkets have made little progress in the past six months.

The survey, which was carried out by the British Market Bureau, took a sample of 29 popular food products and found that 38 per cent of the packaging could not be recycled, down from 40 per cent last October.

Supermarkets performed better in terms of the amount of packaging produced, achieving a reduction in packaging weight of five per cent in the past six months, but chairman of the LGA Environment Board, Paul Bettison, insisted retailers were not going far enough.

“Councils and the public are making good strides and the UK has gone from a recycling rate of 10 per cent a decade ago to over 30 per cent now,” he said. ” But we still have a long way to go to get to the level of the Netherlands or Germany and time and again householders tell us that they do not want to buy packaging that they have to get rid of. Supermarkets say they want to help but the amount of packaging that cannot be recycled has only gone down by two percentage points in the past six months – that’s not a lot.”

He added that about a fifth of waste going into household bins comes from packaging, equating to one million tonnes of waste a year. “Supermarkets can apply incredible pressure to manufacturers to reduce packaging,” he said. “The idea that they are the middle men, as some of them claim, just doesn’t wash.”

The report also claimed that Marks & Spencer, a high-profile supporter of green retail practices through its Plan A campaign, was one of the worst offenders when it came to packaging. It found that M&S tied with Lidl as having the lowest recyclability rates of the eight companies surveyed, with just 62 per cent of the packaging assessed able to be recycled.

M&S hit back at the report, questioning its methodology and implying that the primary cause of low recycling rates in the UK is the absence of sufficient recycling facilities.

“The LGA has chosen to only look at a skewed sample of 29 products out of our 5,500 lines, which are not representative,” said Dr Helene Roberts, head of packaging for food at M&S. “The real issue at the moment is the inconsistency in recycling facilities across the UK.”

She added that an independently audited internal survey had found that 91 per cent of the company’s food packaging is recyclable and that it was aiming to ensure all food packaging can be recycled by 2012.

M&S’ criticism was echoed by Stephen Robertson, director general of the British Retail Consortium (BRC), who insisted retailers were making good progress on reducing packaging levels where appropriate, but further argued that packaging can play a positive role in preventing food deteriorating or being damaged. “The environmental cost of wasted food is much greater than the packaging used to stop that waste,” he said.

Bettison dismissed the criticism, insisting that the sample products used were representative of a typical shopping basket and noting that M&S had so far failed to publish the results of its own survey.

A spokeswoman for the company countered that its packaging survey had been audited by Ernst & Young and would be made public as part of the company’s annual report next month.

Bettison also downplayed suggestions that inadequate recycling facilities were undermining supermarkets’ efforts to limit the impact of packaging. “The supermarkets know that you can recycle card, paper, plastic bottles, tin foil, tin cans and glass almost anywhere in the country,” he said. “What you cannot recycle as easily is thin plastic film – yet this is used in a lot of packaging.”

The suggestion that a lot of packaging is required to limit the risk of damage to products was similarly rejected, with Bettison arguing that loose fruit and vegetables are typically cheaper than that which is packaged. “If there were really high waste rates from the loose products wouldn’t they be more expensive? ” he asked.

The LGA is calling for the government to introduce legislation similar to that widely adopted across Europe which requires retailers and producers to be responsible for funding the collection of packaging. “If the cost were pushed onto the suppliers, they would have an incentive to really look at cost-effective ways of cutting packaging,” said Bettison.

However, the BRC’s Robertson insisted that the retail sector was already funding recycling programmes, both through retailers’ own initiatives to promote recycling and the £4.5bn per year the sector pays in business rates towards local authority funding.

Source: Business Green

Attempts by The Guardian Newspaper to apologise in its libel battle with Tesco have backfired, with the supermarket’s lawyers branding follow-up articles on the company’s tax structures as “false, misleading, unfair, disingenuous and downright dishonest”. The row blew up last month when Tesco launched legal proceedings for libel and malicious falsehood following reports that it had created offshore joint venture partnerships to avoid up to £1 billion of corporation tax on the sale of UK properties and also dodged the corporation tax on £500 million of profits from two earlier deals. Tesco claims the reports are untrue and it has repeatedly told the paper so.

Article Source: The Independent
News Source: CC Briefing