Hitting our Sustainability Targets
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Published 22 May 2024 in Raising Awareness
Last year, to further embed sustainability within every level of our Society, we agreed sustainability linked finance targets with our banking partners. This means that working to create a fairer, more sustainable and ethical future is at the core of how we do business.
The banking targets are focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and food waste across the Society’s operations and include reducing direct GHG emissions by 40% by Jan 2026 compared to 2019, and reducing controllable food waste by 30% over the same timeframe.
The Society’s phased target for the 2023/24 year was to reduce direct GHG emissions by 25%, and food waste by 20%.
We are proud to announce that we have exceeded both targets with a 32% reduction in GHG emissions compared to 2019, and a 21% reduction in controllable food waste compared to 2019.
The GHG emission reduction was achieved through measures including helping you, our colleagues, to adopt more sustainable behaviours at work, investing in replacing refrigeration units in 50 stores and introducing LED lighting in 139 stores.
At the same time, improvements in operational processes and our partnership with Tood Good To Go, which allows customers and members to purchase “magic bags” of discounted food that may otherwise have gone to waste, have reduced the number of food waste items across our stores by over 600,000 compared to 2019 levels
The sustainability linked targets also include our more complex indirect GHG emissions – known as scope 3 emissions –which include those associated with our products and services and require the plans to reduce these emissions to be validated by the Science-based Targets Initiative (SBTi).
We became one of the first major UK retail co-operative to achieve this validation in January 2024.
These sustainability efforts have not gone unnoticed. We have been shortlisted for several awards including ‘Retailer of the Year’ at the UK Green Business Awards. Younity, our joint venture with Octopus Energy to support community energy producers, has also been recognised with nominations at the Better Society Awards 2024 and The British Renewable Energy Awards.
We’re proud to have exceeded our targets to date and I want to thank all of our colleagues, members and customers who have helped us to deliver these achievements. But we also know that the hard work doesn’t stop here, and we remain laser-focused in making further progress and driving positive change across our business and in our communities.