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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

IBM, Tesco and Dell are among a select group of major consumer and technology companies taking active steps toward addressing the risks and capitalizing on the opportunities posed by climate change, according to a new report from the nonprofit Ceres.

Yet there is still much work to be done, Ceres found, particularly at the board and CEO levels: The boards of 11 of the 63 companies analyzed in “Corporate Governance and Climate Change: Consumer and Technology Companies” hear climate-specific updates, and just seven CEOs have assumed leadership roles on climate change initiatives. None of the consumer and technology companies examined tie related performance to the compensation of their top officers. Read more

Source: GreenBiz

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.

Business leaders including directors at Tesco, Lloyds TSB and other top high street names have urged Gordon Brown to drop his slowly, slowly approach to tackling global warming and go for “transformational change”, saying the prime minister should not be held back by fears over the current financial crisis, the Guardian reports.

The companies, all members of The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, said they saw their own business opportunities in being at the head of a green revolution, but wanted regulatory certainty to help them plan their investments better. Read more.

Source: Guardian

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

Firms were today urged to take time to ensure they already have an accurate idea of their carbon footprint before setting any emission reduction targets.

The recommendation is made in a new best practice guide for carbon management, developed by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and IT giant IBM, which argues that firms keen to reduce carbon emissions need to adopt a “properly formulated” carbon strategy built around clear targets.

The report is based on research into the carbon management strategies undertaken at a number of high profile firms signed up to the CDP’s initiative to promote corporate reporting of carbon emissions, including HBOS, Lloyds TSB, Scottish and Southern Energy, Tesco and Unilever.

It advises that the best practices revealed from these organisations suggest firms should undertake substantial ground work before adopting a carbon management strategy. In particular, it claims that “monitoring and measuring carbon emissions is important before reduction commitments are made”, as it allows managers to identify areas for improvement and set more accurate targets. Read more

Source: Business Green

Relations between the government and the UK’s leading supermarkets are in danger of deteriorating in the wake of the government’s threat to impose a tax on plastic bags.

According to reports in The Guardian newspaper, environment secretary Hilary Benn this week met with the bosses of a number of the UK’s leading supermarkets who expressed concern that the threat of a tax on plastic bags would undermine existing voluntary agreement to cut bag use.

Marks & Spencer’s Sir Stuart Rose, Tesco’s Sir Terry Leahy, Andy Bond of Asda and Justin King of Sainsbury’s joined bosses from Morrissons, Somerfield and the Co-op for the discussion, which one source said had turned into a “very heated debate”. Read more

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