Sainsbury’s has said that its Local stores no longer send waste to landfill and its supermarkets will achieve the same “zero waste to landfill” target by the end of this year.
Paul Crewe, Sainsbury’s head of sustainability, engineering, energy and environment, said: “For many years Sainsbury’s has recovered cardboard and plastic for re-use in the packaging our suppliers deliver into our stores. Last year alone we put 150,000 tonnes of cardboard and around 10,000 tonnes of plastic packaging back into the packaging industry. Likewise all the waste paper and wood we create is recovered and processed for recycling.
“Over the last few years we have really explored lots of opportunities to reduce and dispose of our waste food, linking up with local and national charities, such as FareShare, to distribute our in-date food to worthy causes throughout the UK. But latterly we have been concentrating on the food waste past its best-before date, which until a few years ago all went to landfill.”
Out-of-date food waste is segregated in stores every day and bakery waste is sent daily on the stores' returning delivery vehicles to RDCs where it is consolidated and sent to be processed into animal feed.
Remaining food waste is collected and sent to anaerobic digesters. In Scotland the remaining food waste is collected from store and sent back to an anaerobic digestion plant in Cumbernauld. In England and Wales it is collected by Biffa and sent to The Poplars, Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, a relatively new anaerobic digestion facility which opened in June last year, and is thought to be the biggest in the UK. It will process up to 120,000 tonnes of food waste from homes and businesses every year to produce enough renewable energy to power 10,000 homes and a soil improver that can be used in the same way as compost.
Less than five per cent of food waste is generated by retail, compared to nearly 50 per cent from households, and Sainsbury’s has now achieved zero food waste to landfill.
