Reducing Waste - Our operations

Recycling waste – Our customers

This is another area where our colleagues and customers play a huge role. Every year colleagues recycle 125,000 tonnes of cardboard and 8,500 tonnes of plastic film, plus all of our point-of-sale materials and office paper. Working in partnership with bio-fuel suppliers we also recover and recycle over one million litres of cooking oil annually from our stores. We were the UK's first retailer to offer battery and light-bulb recycling facilities to customers in every store, alongside more general recycling bins. Over a quarter of a million batteries have been recycled since this started in February 2010, which is more than any other UK supermarket. We also now recycle customer mobile phones, satellite navigation devices, printer cartridges and clothing.

This is only one way in which we try to encourage our customers to recycle more themselves. We also use the widely recognised 'on pack recycling logos' on most of our own brand products and we are the only UK supermarket to offer recycling facilities for polythene packaging like grape, cereal bags and plastic carrier bags. In fact, we led the first ever mixed plastics recycling trial in the UK, funded by WRAP. The aim was to identify the most practical and economical way to collect different types of plastic packaging at a single collection point. We are now awaiting the final results of the trial.

This is all good progress but there are some things that remain real challenges beyond our control. For example, we are trying to reduce the volume of our packaging and make as much of our packaging recyclable as possible, but local authorities who manage recycling at our stores cannot offer a single, national and consistent collection scheme nationwide. This makes it very difficult for our customers to know exactly what they can recycle and makes it difficult for us to communicate a clear, 'one size fits all' message about recycling. We will continue to work with Government to find a satisfactory solution to this problem.

Carrier bags – Our customers

We know that plastic bags are a concern for many people and our customers, colleagues and stakeholders often tell us they would like us to do more to reduce the number they use. We believe that encouraging customers to change their behaviour is the best way to reduce the numbers of bags, rather than introducing a ban or tax. In 2009 we successfully contributed to the retail sector voluntary initiative to reduce the number of bags given out by 50% and all our bags have a lower environmental footprint with 50% recycled material. We encourage customers to reuse their bags by giving them a Nectar point each time they reuse either their own bag or one of ours. Last year, we gave out approximately 70% more Nectar points than the year before for bag reusage, a total of over 462 million. We have also seen a 12% increase in the sale of our 'Bag for Life' range which further shows our efforts at helping customers to reuse bags are having real results. We are now trialling new signage to remind customers to bring their bags from the carpark.