Our carbon footprint
We have set ambitious targets to reduce our own footprint, reduce the emissions from our supply chain, and help our customers to reduce their footprints too.
Reducing our carbon emissions is the right thing to do for a responsible business seeking sustainable profits. It conserves energy, saves money, helps deliver energy security and better resource efficiency. Plus our customers want to see us play our part.
So we have set ambitious targets to reduce our own footprint with the ultimate aim of being a zero-carbon business by 2050, without purchasing offsets. That means reducing our energy and fuel use as far as possible and using renewable sources to supply the energy we do need.
The work we have done so far has been independently recognised as world-leading. In September 2011, Tesco was named the top retailer in the Carbon Disclosure Project’s UK FTSE 350 and Global 500 reports for our carbon reporting and performance.
Our global direct carbon footprint in 2011/12 was 5.66 million tonnes of CO2e. We continued to decouple our business growth from the growth in our carbon emissions: while our net sales area grew by 9%, our carbon footprint increased by only 5%. See how we calculate our carbon footprint.
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Total Carbon Footprint by Market 2011/12
| Country | Tonnes CO2e |
|---|---|
| China | 442,000 |
| Czech Republic | 239,000 |
| Hungary | 232,000 |
| India | 18,000 |
| Republic of Ireland | 199,000 |
| Malaysia | 183,000 |
| Poland | 409,000 |
| Slovakia | 93,000 |
| South Korea | 518,000 |
| Thailand | 605,000 |
| Turkey | 118,000 |
| United Kingdom | 2,480,000 |
| United States | 123,000 |
Getting to zero
Achieving our ambition of becoming a zero-carbon business by 2050 will require us to reduce our absolute carbon emissions across the Group. We aim to achieve this not by purchasing carbon offsets but by generating all our electricity and heat/cooling from renewable sources. If there are any residual emissions that we cannot eliminate, we will generate more renewable energy than we need and pass the excess to others.
