Tesco plans to “spark a mass movement in green consumption”, it has claimed, in the same week that Marks & Spencer announced progress on its five-year sustainability strategy, Plan A.
Tesco ceo Sir Terry Leahy made the announcement in a speech to the Politics of Climate Change conference last week, where he insisted that a green strategy was “locked into the core” of the business. He said: “My principle here is that you can be green and grow… Green growth requires a leap in technology to propel us from a high-carbon economy to a low-carbon economy. But that won’t be enough to cut carbon on the scale required. We need consumers, through their purchasing and their behaviour, to embrace these technologies, and the products and services that flow from them.”
He added: “By building demand for low-carbon consumption, consumers will stimulate competition between businesses to produce greener alternatives than current products and services.”
Sir Terry also announced that Tesco will be building the world’s first zero-carbon store in Cambridgeshire and trialling electric-car charging points at some stores.
At the same time, M&S released feedback for its five-year, 100-point Plan A, as part of its annual How We Do Business report.
This showed that cost savings made on climate change and waste initiatives have already made Plan A cash positive halfway through its term. A total of 39 of the 100 commitments are complete, while 24 of these have been extended to cover more ambitious targets since the launch of the strategy in January 2007.
The retailer has also increased the amount of electricity sourced from renewable suppliers from two per cent to 31 per cent.
Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of M&S, said: “The economic downturn has made our targets more challenging but we don’t think this is a reason to compromise, or an excuse not to deliver on our commitments...
“Customers have come to rely on us to do the right thing, a responsibility we don’t take lightly.”
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