3. Caring for the environment
As one of the world’s leading retailers, we have a clear responsibility – and a significant opportunity – to protect our environment.
Our aim is to create more sustainable ways of doing business. We are reducing our impact on the environment, including energy use and waste. We are working with our suppliers to reduce the carbon footprint of the products we sell and manage resources such as water more carefully in our supply chain. We are also empowering our customers who, together, can have a positive impact on the environment that far outweighs our own, to create a mass movement in green consumption.
We have set ourselves challenging emissions reduction targets for each of these areas, on our way to becoming a zero-carbon business by 2050. Some examples of our recent work include:
- Converting over 100 stores to natural refrigeration across the Group;
- Supporting the Lake Naivasha water stewardship project in Kenya to help raise the water levels and reduce water pollution;
- Making significant use of rail transport in the UK in place of lorries. We have four dedicated rail services, saving 15,000 tonnes of CO2e per year and taking 14 million miles off the road;
- Calculating the carbon footprint of over 400 of our dairy farms in order to provide advice on emissions reduction to individual farmers; and
- Partnering with Unilever to raise awareness amongst customers of sustainable product choices. In Turkey, for instance, over 10,000 customers were encouraged to reduce their water footprint.
