Sir Terry Leahy gave a speech on the theme of “Green Grocer? Tesco, Carbon and the Consumer” at a joint Forum for the Future and Tesco event in central London on January 18.
It set out how we can use our unique relationship with customers to deliver a revolution in green consumption. It also included ambitious targets for us to reduce our own emissions.
Some of the highlights include:
- We will begin the search for a universally accepted and commonly understood measure of the carbon footprint of the products we sell and will take the first steps towards developing a Sustainable Consumption Institute to lead this work. This will enable us to label our products so that customers can compare their carbon footprint easily.
- We will promote and incentivise energy efficient products through our Green Clubcard scheme and also extend Green Clubcard points to environmentally friendly products from a wider range of categories, for example organic food, products made from recycled or biodegradable materials and Fairtrade. We will also bring down the cost of going green, beginning by halving the price of energy-efficient light bulbs.
- We will reduce the carbon footprint of our existing stores and distribution centres around the world by 50% per cent by 2020 and ensure that all new stores we build between now and 2020 emit on average at least 50 per cent less carbon than an equivalent store in 2006.
- We will seek to restrict air transport to less than 1 per cent of our products and will put an aeroplane symbol on all air-freighted products in our stores.
Read the full speech here
We also promised to calculate our direct Carbon Footprint as a business and to put it on our website so that customers and others can understand our impact.
On the basis of work carried out by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), we now know that our total footprint is 4.1m tonnes CO2e.
More information about Measuring Our Carbon Footprint
