The Co-operative Group has announced that it expects to be diverting all waste produced at its food stores from landfill by July 2013.

As part of the group’s ethical plan, the company set out a target to divert all food store waste from landfill by the end of 2013; however due to this extra push, it is now expected that the target will be achieved five months ahead of schedule.

The group already has in place a ‘waste back-haul’ initiative at 1,500 of its food stores, which sees waste sent to waste management company Biffa to be ‘recycled, reused, turned into energy or sold on’. The service will now be extended to more than 2,800 of its stores, in the hopes of diverting all its food store waste - more than 34,000 tonnes – away from landfill by July 2013.

Service details

The back-haul system involves waste being segregated at store level, before being collected and delivered to Biffa by The Co-operative’s Logistics Service.

The majority of the waste (64 per cent) collected from food stores is made up of food and organic materials (such as flowers), which is then sent for anaerobic digestion to generate biogas energy.

‘Customer and general waste’ (till receipts, non-recyclable confectionary wrappings, and some food) makes up 21 per cent of the group’s food stores’ waste and is sent to refuse-derived fuel facilities to be shredded and dehydrated into solid waste to produce fuel. According to Co-op, it was concluded that the 'greenest alternative to landfill that could process all of this waste was RDF'.

Any dry recyclables collected (15 per cent of all food store waste), such as empty milk bottles, tins, cans and office paper, go to dedicated materials recovery facilities for further sorting, with cardboard and polythene baled and sorted for recycling separately at source.

It is hoped the scheme will not only reduce the company’s road footprint by ‘thousands of miles’ (by ending more than 225,000 skip collections) but also halve the group’s ‘food waste management’ costs.

Speaking of the initiative, David Roberts, Director of Trading Property at The Co-operative Food, said: “The Co-operative has one of the largest and most complex networks of all food retailers in the UK and we therefore needed a robust, but commercially viable, strategy to meet our own tough targets….

“The waste back-haul project is a win-win solution. It will not only divert all our food store waste away from landfill, but will also convert it into a valuable resource, which we believe sets new standards in waste management.”

Marcus Gover, Director of Closed Loop Economy, WRAP, which has worked alongside The Co-operative in an advisory role during the trials for the waste back-hauling project, commented: “The Co-operative Food has developed a solution that fits with the complexity of their portfolio, large number of sites and their locations across the UK. It will achieve diversion of waste from landfill through increased recycling and treatment of food waste by AD – all whilst reducing their waste management costs.

“We are supportive of this project and commend them on introducing this scheme across all their stores.”

Tesco to reduce food waste

Co-Operative’s announcement comes just days after retail giant Tesco announced that it was also focusing on tackling food waste as part of its Tesco and Society plan.

The group’s ‘Scale for Good’ section of the plan identifies three main ambitions for the year ahead, including ‘to lead in reducing food waste globally’.

As one of the world’s largest retailers, Tesco sells food to 50 million customers around the world and thus has ‘significant opportunities’ to reduce food waste globally across the value chain.

To identify reduction opportunities, Tesco said that it is working with farmers and suppliers to detail how much waste is occurring in the supply chain (which it has identified as being the main culprit for food waste) and to work to discover where ‘current practices – and those of suppliers and customers – are contributing to unnecessary food waste’. Baseline data is expected to be published on this by ‘the end of the year’.

Tesco has pledged to also help tackle the ‘underlying causes of food waste in the home’ by ‘working to improve how [it] displays date codes on products’ and developing a ‘total food waste measure’ for each of the food items most regularly sold in [its] stores’.

It will also be rolling out practices already utilised in the UK across stores in Hungary and Malaysia, including sending bakery waste to be converted into animal feed, donating unsold food to charities such as FareShare and sending unrecoverable food waste to anaerobic digestion facilities.

Matt Simister, Tesco’s Commercial Director for the Group Food and Action Team Leader on Reducing Food Waste said: “In our work so far, we have surveyed our farmers and suppliers, and are carrying out our most detailed food waste research to date with Tesco customers. We have also opened a dialogue with key national and international bodies, academics, leading NGO and charity programmes.

“Taken together, this approach and the initiatives outlined provide a strong starting point for us to use our scale and reach throughout the value chain to lead in reducing food waste.”

Targets are ‘preposterously unambitious’

Work in reducing the grocery sector’s waste and packaging has been the focus of the recently launched third phase of the Courtauld Commitment, of which both The Co-Operative and Tesco are signatories.

The issue of food waste from the grocery sector has been receiving a great deal of press recently, with the publication of reports from organisations including the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and campaigning group This is Rubbish (TiR). The latter resulted in calls for greater transparency from the industry and for food waste audits to be made mandatory, with Beth Stuart, TiR Research Coordinator, saying: “The food industry has had a chance to get on top of its food waste problem via voluntary agreements like the Courtauld Commitment, but these continue to lack urgency, ambition and uptake across supply chains.”

Indeed, speaking to Resource, food waste campaigner Tristram Stuart claimed that the Courauld Commitment targets are ‘preposterously unambitious’, and that the grocery sector is responsible for considerably more food waste than is generally accepted, as their figures are self-reported and “all the waste that arises overseas, which results from the policies that we have in the United Kingdom [such as cosmetic standards]... is off our balance sheet”.