Waste
Waste
Our approach
To manage our waste effectively we’ve focused on:
- Segregating waste at stores and distribution centres
- Reducing the amount of product packaging
- Introducing reuseable packaging solutions
- Improving the way we forecast catalogue and flyer distribution
- Offering customers a recycling service for large electrical appliances
- Encouraging customers to recycle water filters, batteries and light bulbs
- Offering customers carrier bags only when they need them
What we’ve done
We’ve reduced landfill waste by 85% over the last five years, down from 50,400 to 7,500 tonnes – a massive reduction of 43,000 tonnes. We’re now recycling over 87% of all our waste and making good progress towards our aspiration of ‘zero waste to landfill’.
Last year, our total waste fell by 5% and we’re targeting a further 6% reduction in 2011/12. We’ve successfully cut the waste that our stores, distribution centres and offices send to landfill by reinforcing the importance of waste segregation and encouraging our colleagues to do their bit. We’ll continue to run waste awareness campaigns in our stores, offices and distribution centres.
Aspiring to achieve zero waste to landfill provides an effective call to action right across our business – challenging behaviour and helping to bring about significant operational change. All our distribution centres regularly achieve over 90% recycling rates and all but two are ISO14001 accredited.
Packaging
This year we used 4% less retail packaging overall, and reduced total packaging (including transit packaging) on our own brand and direct sourced products by 20% – a saving of over 10,000 tonnes.
We’ve signed up to the WRAP home improvement sector packaging initiative (which targets a 15% reduction in retail packaging on own brand and direct sourced product by 2012, compared with 2007) and are ahead of target with a 25% reduction achieved to date.
A reusable sofa delivery bag launched last year is expected to cut packaging by 500 tonnes in 2011/12 and we’re extending this concept to other product ranges including mattresses, kitchen plinths and baths.
We aim to remove all expanded polystyrene (eps) from our own brand televisions by the end of this year and we’re exploring other ways to make our packaging easier to open and to recycle.
Paper use
Improving the way we forecast and manage catalogue and flyer distribution has helped us achieve a 6.5% reduction in paper volumes compared to last year – down to 114,000 tonnes from 122,000 tonnes in 2009/10, with 2.8 million fewer catalogues printed.
Carrier bags
Our continuing efforts to encourage customers to use even fewer carrier bags have been less successful this year. We’ve achieved a 45% reduction in carrier bag this year (against 2005/06), compared with 53% last year. We won’t introduce charges for carrier bags unless required to do so by legislation, although we believe a legally-imposed compulsory charge would help achieve a step change in customer behaviour.
Other initiatives
We’ve introduced a number of other waste reduction initiatives this year, including:
Climate Change
Climate Change
Our approach
We’re committed to reduce our carbon footprint (per sq ft) by 40% by 2020 (compared to 2006 levels) by :
- Cutting energy consumption in our buildings
- Improving commercial transport efficiency
- Reducing business travel emissions
We’re not a manufacturer, but our actions have an impact on climate change. That’s why we set ourselves challenging targets for energy consumption and vehicle fuel efficiency. It’s not just the environment that benefits if we succeed. We save money by reducing our energy consumption and carbon emissions.
Our priority is to reduce CO2 at source, so we don’t participate in any carbon offset schemes.
What we’ve done
We’re proud to have achieved the Carbon Trust Standard in 2010 for reducing carbon emissions across Home Retail Group.
Using the Government’s emission factors prior to October 2010, we achieved a reduction in carbon emissions of 4% year on year and 17% over five years. This year, our building energy consumption has remained fairly flat and these reductions have been achieved by purchasing electricity from more efficient combined heat and power plants (CHP).
However, the changes made by the Government to the carbon emissions factors for CHP in October 2010 mean that these reductions are reversed. Consequently, we have had to restate our carbon emissions and they now show an increase of 3% on last year (mainly due to increased fuel use - see below) and a reduction over the last five years of only 0.6%.
Buildings
This year we’ve focused on rolling out automatic metering (AMRs) for electricity and gas across our stores and sites. Most sites are now equipped with these meters, and we believe that we’re one of the first retailers to have installed automated meter readers for gas supplies. Automated meter readers provide regular analysis of use on an hourly and daily basis, helping us to manage consumption much more effectively.
As a consequence of last winter's extreme weather conditions, we’ve been unable to achieve the energy reductions we targeted, despite our ‘closed door’ policy and energy saving campaigns in stores and distribution centres. We targeted a 2% reduction in kwh/sq ft but our total energy consumption for the year has remained broadly flat at 39 kwh/sqft. Find out more in our Case study section.
Transport
We’ve achieved a reduction in fuel use of 8.6% and a reduction in total distance travelled (km) by 9.8% over a 5-year period, but we've seen an increase in fuel use on last year of 8% and an increase in total distance travelled of 7.9% . These increases are due to an increase in trunking between distribution centres, following the rationalisation of our distribution network. We plan to reverse this trend in 2011/12 and have set ourselves internal targets to reduce kilometres travelled compared to last year. Our fleet’s carbon emissions were similar to last year at 90k tonnes. Find out more in our Case study section.
We reviewed the carbon impact of our transport fleet at the beginning of 2011, identifying an absence of data for some of our third party operations in Ireland, the Highlands and other remote areas. These absences, which account for approximately 6% of the fleet’s carbon emissions, will be incorporated in our 2011/12 reports.
Business travel
Most of our 1,369 company cars now run on diesel and we actively reduce the fleet’s carbon emissions by listing new cars with superior fuel consumption and encouraging company car drivers to choose ‘greener’ options when renewing their vehicles. We measure CO2 emissions from all hire car, air and rail business travel. We also calculate the CO2 benefits of using telephone and video conferencing. Find out more in our Case study section.
Water
We can now measure water consumption at 95% of our sites and we have made significant progress in reducing our water costs. We’ve successfully trialled ‘grey water’ (collected rain) to wash vehicles at one of our distribution centres and now extended this to a second distribution centre. We’re also using ‘grey water’ in two Homebase garden centres and will asess the success of this trial next year.