Supermarket chain looks to improve its waste record

In the week that the chain sponsored its first recycling roadshow, the Slim Your Bin campaign in East Anglia, a spokesman for Tesco said that the retailing giant is also radically altering the way it does business in order to minimise waste.

Tesco's Steve Gracey told letsrecycle.com: “We have some tough targets on recycling, but we do also have some plans in place to minimise our waste. What you will find in our grocery aisles is that instead of cardboard boxes, we have distributors delivering produce with our re-usable green trays – we've saved 148,000 boxes that way.”

As well as the 46,000 tonnes cardboard saved in their green tray system, which won the Queens’s Award for the Environment in 2000, Mr Gracey explained that they also reduce secondary waste by having items such as Coca Cola bottles delivered in large pallets surrounded by only one layer of plastic film, rather than individually wrapping them, which uses more packaging.

The store has facilities at its stores to ensure that as much behind-the-scenes material is collected for recycling as possible. Last year, Tesco recycled 173,889 tonnes of cardboard and 12,314 tonnes of plastic from its own operations. According to the supermarket, it also attempts to use recycled materials “wherever possible” in non-food products and consumer packaging.

However, there have been some criticisms that supermarkets in Britain show little signs of actively reducing the amount of packaging sold to customers, and this area seems to be the last to be tackled by Tesco, which instead prefers to put money into promoting household recycling.

Tesco's &#39f;igurehead' Prunella Scales urges householders to recycle more

East Anglia
At the Slim Your Bin campaign in East Anglia last week, Tesco donated 100,000 re-usable bags to shoppers, and the company's &#39f;igurehead', Prunella Scales, was on hand to persuade householders to get more involved in recycling.

“It is up to all of us to recycle more,” Ms Scales said, “and it’s much easier now that most people have a doorstep recycling collection. The benefits are massive, reducing environmental pollution and saving some of the 150 million Eastern region councils currently spend every year shifting our waste and burying it.”

The Tesco-sponsored roadshow was the fourth such event run by the Anglia Region Waste Awareness Campaign, which involves 57 local authorities in the region. The campaign was originally launched in June, with the aim of increasing recycling by 25%.

As well as this campaign, Tesco has 430 recycling centres at its stores nationwide. Last month it launched a scheme to recycle computer cartridges, with funds raised going towards medical research. It was also recently highly commended for its carrier bag recycling scheme by compliance scheme Valpak (see letsrecycle.com story).