Our Sustainability Milestones
This article will take approximately 2 minutes to read
Published 13 Nov 2025 in Raising Awareness
As world leaders, businesses, and scientists gather in Brazil this week for the COP30 conference, we’ve taken the opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made towards our sustainability targets with the help of our remarkable colleagues and members.
We’ve published our Sustainable Impact Highlights Report 2024/25 to chart our progress and share the milestones we’ve hit in areas such as the reduction of greenhouse gases, solar panel installation, and support for community energy.
Here are the main takeaways from the report:
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Our Society won Sustainability Initiative of the Year for our member-led sustainability strategy at the Grocer Gold Awards 2025. This award recognises the great work that our remarkable colleagues and members have helped to shape and deliver, doing good together to make the world a fairer and more sustainable place
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Over the last three years, we have invested over £9 million in energy efficiency projects, including installing low energy lighting, new automation technology in our fridges and temperature control units across our Food stores. These improvements have helped us cut our energy use year on year, saving around 400 tonnes of CO2 per year through energy efficiencies
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Since forming our partnership with Big Solar Co-op in 2024, we have installed over 1,000 solar panels across a selection of our sites, saving over 60 tonnes of CO2 per year
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We have celebrated the five-year anniversary of Younity, our joint venture with Octopus. Through this initiative, we now support over 400 community energy projects, creating enough green energy to power approximately 65,000 homes. Younity has also launched its free volunteering platform, Community Energy Connect, which matches community energy groups with volunteers in fields such as law, finance, marketing, and events, allowing them to pool skills and expertise
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At the end of the last financial year, we had reduced food waste across our Food stores by 25% compared to 2019, equivalent to saving around 700,000 items of food waste annually. As part of this activity, we rolled out our partnership with Olio, a food waste re-distribution organisation. Since this partnership began in 2024, we have enabled 300,000 items of food that were due to be thrown away to be distributed to households in need
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We are encouraging the future generation to protect and restore nature through early education at Little Pioneers, our early years business. Our curriculum allows children to learn about a range of sustainability topics, including biodiversity and water conservation, with outdoor education and a focus on where food comes from also key parts of learning
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We continue to make progress against our greenhouse gas reduction targets, including by lowering our absolute direct GHG emissions by 38% compared to 2019 levels
Read our sustainability report
It’s the support of our wonderful colleagues that allows us to make meaningful and sustainable change as a co-operative and we’d like to take this time to thank each and every one of you. Together, we’re doing good together to make the world a greener and fairer place for all.
The report can be viewed here.