Four years after it stopped sending food waste to land fill sites, Sainsbury’s has become the first retailer in the country to power one of its stores with green electricity.
Like the rest of the supermarkets in its chain, the Sainsbury’s store at Cannock donates all out-of-date food suitable for human consumption to local charities.
Any other food waste that cannot be used as animal feed is sent to a nearby anaerobic digestion plant to be converted to energy.
At Biffa’s Staffordshire site the leftover food is turned into bio methane gas which is then used to generate electricity and which, in turn, is fed back to the store just over a mile away through a newly constructed cable.
Closing the loop on food recycling has taken on Holy Grail proportions for Britain’s “big four” supermarket retailers. Finding a solution took Sainsbury’s more than two years but, as Paul Crewe its head of sustainability admits, unplugging from the National Grid may not be right for everyone.
“We’re delighted to be the first business ever to make use of this link-up technology, allowing our Cannock store to be powered entirely by our food waste,” he said, “but a lot of things need to be in the right place to make that happen.”
Sainsbury’s is already the UK’s largest retail user of anaerobic digestion, generating enough energy to power 2,500 homes each year. In a recent interview the firm’s chief executive officer, Justin King, claimed that in a world of diminishing resources, retailers have a responsibility not only to trade sustainably, but also to encourage their customers to live sustainably.
“The UK leads the world in ensuring that there is as little waste as possible in food supply chains,” King said. “Comparing the UK’s food waste to other, less efficient countries is misleading, we waste less and get more out of our supply chain — and we shouldn’t be penalised for that.
“Eliminating wasted food is the key to a good supply chain, not because of Government incentives but because it’s good business, good for our customers budgets, good for keeping our costs down and good for communities.”
Sainsbury’s has so far refused to say exactly how much waste food is uses, but from its announcement it seems there is limited opportunity to power more stores this way. Biffa not only picks up food waste from the Cannock store, but also from other Sainsbury’s supermarkets across the UK to be digested at the plant.
According to Wrap, the Government funded organisation that promotes recycling and sustainability, the Staffordshire anaerobic digestion plant is merely the high-profile tip of a quiet revolution within UK business.
“There are now 60 anaerobic digestion plants recycling food waste across the country,” said Wrap director Richard Swannell. “These can process up to 2.5 million tonnes of food waste a year and generate enough renewable electricity to power a city three times the size of Cannock.”
