THE grocery chain J Sainsbury will tomorrow open its flagship green store in Dartmouth, Devon, which is expected to become the model for all its new supermarkets.

The store, which has been built from timber rather than steel and will be heated by a biomass boiler running on wood chips, is also expected to save Sainsbury about a third on its energy bills.

The company said that all new stores would incorporate as many of the new green features of the Dartmouth site as possible and pledged that two supermarkets a year and one convenience store would look to “stretch” the group’s thinking on the environment by testing innovative technologies.

The retailer will stress that the opening in Dartmouth is not simply a concept store to display what can be done but will be used as a template for new openings.

“This is not a showcase for the sake of having a showcase,” said Neil Sachdev, commercial director at Sainsbury, which opened its first green store in 1999 at Greenwich, southeast London.

The biomass boiler, which was tested at a store in Alnwick, Northumberland, is fired by locally sourced wood. It uses no gas, while the electricity taken from the national grid will be halved. Rainwater will be used for cleaning and to flush the lavatories.

The construction was also done in an environmentally-friendly way, with 90% of the building waste being recycled.

Sainsbury, led by chief executive Justin King, estimates that energy costs at Dartmouth will be two-thirds of those at one of its regular supermarkets, which spend about £200,000 a year on gas and electricity.

The big food retailers have been working hard to outdo each other when it comes to environmentally-friendly shops. Last October, Marks & Spencer converted a store in Bournemouth to be the greenest in its estate and has been applying 60% of the features of that site to new outlets.

And at its annual results in June, Tesco said it had four “environmental stores” open.

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