Sainsbury’s has credited new technologies and improved green skills for engineers with helping it reduce its carbon footprint. The retailer said last week it has achieved an absolute reduction of six per cent since 2007-08 despite growing its floor space by around 25 per cent over the last four years.
As the Carbon Disclosure Project published its FTSE 350 Climate Change Report 2012 Report last week, Neil Sachdev, property director at Sainsbury’s, said: “A lack of training for refrigeration engineers had prevented our switch to climate-friendly refrigeration systems because the technology is new and unfamiliar. We saw this gap in skills and expertise as a real opportunity for us so we invested in industry recognised and hands-on training for around 200 of our service engineers.
“Many of them have now completed the training and this new injection of green skills will help to grow the market for CO2 refrigeration and help to support future job creation. It’s also great news for the environment because the new carbon dioxide technology has much less of an impact on climate change.”
The retailer said it has reduced its absolute carbon emissions by 3.5 per cent over the past year through energy efficiency and carbon reduction programmes. Investment in new technologies is part of Sainsbury's target to reduce its operational carbon emissions by 30 per cent absolute by 2020, against a baseline of 2005-06. This is part of a broader target of an absolute carbon reduction of 50 per cent by 2030, both of which are detailed in Sainsbury’s 20 by 20 Sustainability Plan.
Other initiatives the retailer has invested in are solar panels on 169 stores giving it the largest multi-roof solar array in the UK and Europe. And Sainsbury’s is the UK’s largest retailer-user of anaerobic digestion (AD) and has achieved its target of zero food waste to landfill.
Since last year, waste food from all stores that is not donated through charities such as FareShare is backhauled to the depots and either used for animal feed or anaerobic digestion to create electricity for the national grid.
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