Lee, who has seen Greenpac grow from nothing to annual sales of £2m in four years, believes that last week marked a tipping point. “The repercussions could be massive,” he said. “It is great that M&S and Tesco had the guts to do it. Now everyone is going to have to sit up and take notice.” BUT why should anyone be particularly worried about the environmental impact of supermarkets? There are plenty of other sectors of British industry that, on the face of it, are far greater sinners.
Research conducted for The Sunday Times by Trucost, a provider of environmental data, shows that the combined direct emissions — from fuel, gas and electricity — of M&S, Wm Morrison, Tesco and Sainsbury amount to only 0.72% of the UK’s overall carbon-dioxide emissions.
That makes the retailers sound benign enough. But add the impact on climate change of their supply chains and the production of the goods they sell and the picture is very different.
Trucost estimates that these emissions are more than 31 times greater than the car-bon-dioxide total for which these retailers are directly responsible. M&S itself reckons that its supply-chain emissions are 27 times larger than those that can be attributed to the retailing operation. And in the case of food, manufacturing produces far more carbon dioxide than retailing.
A report from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) looked at how energy was used in Britain’s entire chain of food production and distribution. The figures, for 2002, showed: n Agriculture accounted for 8%; n Food and drinks production accounted for 27% of energy used; n Transport was responsible for 47%; n Retailing accounted for 18%.
In other words, if we were to buy food from the greenest supermarket in the world — an imaginary shop that managed to get food onto its shelves and keep it fresh while creating absolutely no carbon-dioxide emissions — then a great deal of energy would still have been consumed in producing and getting the food to the shop in the first place.
Northern Foods pledged in 2001 to cut its carbon emissions by a quarter by 2010 and already recycles half the waste produced by its factories. “Our ambition is to move to zero waste in two or three years,” said Norman Pickavance, the company’s corporate-services director.
Northern has worked out how much energy has been used to get an item to the supermarket shelf, and it has produced some intriguing comparisons.
Which is worse for the environment: driving a mile in your car or eating a packet of ginger nuts?
The answer? There’s very little in it. Producing a packet of ginger nuts — from transporting the raw materials and making the mix to baking the biscuits, packing and distributing them to a shop — puts about 210 grams of carbon dioxide into the environment. In a medium-sized car, you would have much the same effect by driving a mile.
The Defra report focused on “food miles” — the distance that food is transported between farm gate and the home. It found that vehicles transporting food travelled an estimated 19 billion miles in 2002 — about a quarter of all lorry journeys.
Air freight accounted for just 1% of food miles, but was responsible for 11% of car-bon-dioxide emissions. The green consumer may choose, for example, organic string beans. But if these beans have been flown in from Kenya, their environmental cost is huge. Carrying 100 grams of beans from Nairobi to London by air releases at least 340 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Sandra Bell, Friends of the Earth’s supermarkets campaigner, said: “Cutting the amount of air-freighted food will be a key test for supermarkets claiming to be serious about tackling their carbon emissions. They should start by promoting seasonal British produce instead of flying fruit and vegetables halfway round the world.”
THE Andrews family have been Hereford-shire dairy farmers since the mid1700s. Colin Andrews, 49, is one local supplier who has already felt the benefits of the emerging back-to-British movement among grocers. His business, the Dairy House, has 250 milking cows on 1,000 acres and supplies yoghurts and cheese-cakes to Asda and Waitrose.
Colin’s son Ben said of the supermarkets: “Their motives are questionable — they are all jumping on the bandwagon and trying to outdo each other.”
No matter how hard they try to be green, the supermarkets face an apparently insuperable problem. At the core of their operations are their distribution centres loading lorries day and night with food to be taken to stores around the country. Such a system is not designed to handle small amounts of local produce going from a local farmer to a store down the road.
Simon Propper, managing director of the independent corporate-responsibility consultancy Context, criticises all the big retailers for failing to adopt a more radical approach to tackling their emissions.
“M&S is optimising the system it already has,” he said. “But what about pioneering a way to sell more products online? Why do we need an energy-guzzling shop when goods can be ordered online and delivered to our door?”
Propper is also critical of Tesco’s carbon labelling plans. “Sir Terry Leahy’s plans for labelling products with their carbon footprint sound good but are unworkable in practice. There are far too many technical grey areas in calculating the climate impact of a product,” he said.
Friends of the Earth’s Bell also insists there are still important gaps and areas of uncertainty even in the M&S plan. “M&S says it will set a target to reduce air-freighted food but we don’t know how ambitious that target will be. It says it will double regional sourcing but from what base? Doubling may not be significant if it is from a very low starting point,” she said.
“There is still a long way to go before the supermarkets can call themselves green grocers.”
