Turning down the fridges and switching off the lights

By Sarah Murray
Published: July 8 2008 00:43

When last year Tesco, the UK supermarket chain, measured the carbon footprint of its operations it correctly guessed that the lion’s share of its greenhouse gas emissions would come from the power it used in lighting its store and powering its fridges. However, it was surprised to find that refrigerant use represented 19 per cent of the total.
“We wouldn’t have come up with a number that big,” says Katherine Symonds, sustainability manager at Tesco. “And one molecule of HFC [hydro-fluorocarbon] is 3,000 times more potent than one molecule of C02 as a greenhouse gas. So that was a surprising hot spot.”
For Tesco, identifying such “hot spots” through the process of measuring its carbon footprint has been an essential part of its response to climate change and the growing pressure on the world’s natural resources.
“It’s allowed us to invest in the things that will really make an impact, such as natural refrigerants,” says Ms Symonds.
The company has set itself some ambitious goals. These include reducing the footprint of existing buildings by 50 per cent by 2020, making sure all new buildings generate, on average, 50 per cent fewer carbon dioxide emissions than a store built in 2006 and cutting emissions from the company’s fleet of vehicles by 50 per cent by 2012.
Tesco aims to cut the amount of packaging it uses by 25 per cent by 2010 – on branded products as well as Tesco own-brand – and to recycle 80 per cent of its store waste by 2009.
Renewable energy is also part of the picture for Tesco. The company has established a £1m ($2m) sustainable technology fund designed to invest in technologies that are not yet commercially viable.
Some of the investment is going into wind turbines, as well as combined heat and power systems and solar panels. The company already has a 500,000 square foot solar panel on the roof of its Californian distribution centre, for example.
“The payback period is longer than our normal business systems would allowed, so we’ve set aside this money,” explains Ms Symonds. “And we need suppliers in place to give us the technologies we’re going to need.”
With environmental systems, materials and technologies still emerging, experimentation is an important part of Tesco’s strategy. It is testing some of these in selected stores. In Shrewsbury and Wick, for example, it used a timber frame in the construction, instead of a steel one.
“We saw it had a really big impact on the embedded carbon of that store. And there are other benefits – it looks nicer and it’s more resilient in the case of fire,” says Ms Symonds. “So it’s unleashing a lot of creativity and lateral thinking.”
Perhaps most daringly, in 2007, the company announced that it would produce a carbon footprint label for all its products. The idea is that shoppers will eventually be able to compare products on their carbon emissions levels in the way they look at price or nutritional value.
Tesco has its work cut out. For calculating the carbon footprint of consumer products is an extraordinarily complex challenge, requiring examination of everything from raw materials to processing procedures, packaging and transportation.
It is hardly surprising, then, that for this particular goal, the company has set no deadline. Nevertheless, Tesco has already made some progress. About 20 products in its stores now have carbon footprint labels, including light bulbs, orange juice, potatoes and washing detergent. “The green message is sometimes confusing and conflicting – we want to make it as simple as possible, and carbon labelling is a great way of doing that,” says Ms Symonds.
The carbon-labelling project is part of the second main prong of Tesco’s sustainability strategy – helping its customers to reduce their environmental impact. “It’s all very well for us to change our light bulbs, but think of the impact if we get 30m weekly customers doing that,” says Ms Symonds. “If we can help them across a range of little decisions, then we’re really going to make a big difference overall.”
One example of this has been rewarding customers for green behaviour with Clubcard points. Encouraging the re-use of plastic bags in this way has helped save 1.6bn carrier bags since August 2006.
Tricky trade offs can emerge when pursuing environmental strategies, however. One that the food retail industry has encountered is the pressure to reduce “food miles”, cutting the distance that food has travelled. Yet the prospect of halting imports of horticultural produce from countries such as Kenya has prompted questions from development professionals and others, who point out that food exports have boosted the economies of such countries.
Tesco has responded to these questions. The company has set a target that less than 1 per cent of its produce will be air freighted, but when cuts need to be made, it says it will not make them from developing countries. “We’ve taken the view that global poverty is as big an issue as climate change,” says Ms Symonds. “And we have no intention of restricting trade with developing countries.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008