“It is welcome news that any company is taking action to tackle its carbon emissions, but Tesco still has a long way to go. If it is to make a genuine contribution to tackling climate change, Tesco would have to make more fundamental changes to the way it does business. There is no commitment here to source more food locally, instead of flying it in from around the world and trucking it unecessarily up and down the country.

“Tesco is still a long way from being a truly green company. Given its rapid growth, its commitment to sourcing cheap food, and the threat it poses to independent retailers, it is hard to see how it is ever going to get there.”

The environmental group added that shoppers wishing to reduce the environmental impact of their grocery shopping should do their shopping at local shops and farmers markets instead of Tesco.

Friends of the Earth said Tesco would need to address a number of key areas if it was serious about reducing its environmental impacts. These include moving away from car-dependent stores, switching from its global supply chain, radically improving energy efficiency in its stores, and cleaning up its supply chains. Tesco has refused to join the only industry initiative to clean up supplies of palm oil - despite the threat posed to the survival of the orang-utan from the rapidly expanding palm oil industry.

Friends of the Earth said Tesco is continuing to build huge new stores geared up to people shopping by car, with the proportion of floor space taken up by hypermarkets (Tesco Extras) more than tripling over the last five years. Work for DEFRA suggests that car use for food shopping results in costs to society of more than £3.5billion per year from traffic emissions, noise, accidents and congestion.

Tesco’s centralised distribution system means food travels around the country before ending up on the store shelves. A report for the Liberal Democrats found that the lorries of the nine major supermarkets travel a total of 670 million miles per year, equivalent to nearly four return trips to the moon every day.

Tesco also imports food over vast distances - as the UK’s market leader Tesco is responsible for a significant amount of the food imported into the country. In just 3 years to 2002 food freight (by value) increased by 47% - the vast majority of which was shipped in dedicated freight planes.

Tesco could cut down on its energy use by giving more space to home-grown fruit. Tropical fruits imported by plane use over thirty times more energy per kilo than home-grown apples. Instead of supporting British farmers, Tesco’s mission to deliver cheap food for shoppers has pushed prices to farmers down so low that some are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Tesco’s new “Extras” stores are extremely inefficient in terms of energy use. A survey by Sheffield Hallam University found that large superstores are the most energy inefficient buildings in the retail/light industrial sector, despite the relatively new building stock. Taking into account the average size of buildings, the amount of climate changing emissions from superstores compares very badly to those of other food businesses, emitting three times more carbon dioxide than a greengrocers, per square foot.

It would take more than 60 greengrocers to match the carbon dioxide emissions from a single average superstore.

Tesco could also cut down on the amount of food wasted and the amount of packaging used. It is estimated that between 40 and 50 per cent of raw vegetables and salad (by weight) are rejected at some stage of the production line before reaching the shopper. Tesco was among the supermarkets found to be rejecting apples purely on cosmetic grounds in a Friends of the Earth survey of fruit growers.

Packaging makes up nearly a quarter of household waste and 70 per cent of that is food related. Retailer specifications determine how much packaging is used. Food packaging such as plastic wrapping can be difficult to recycle. Plastic production uses eight per cent of the world’s oil - four per cent as raw material and four per cent as energy for the process. To make a real difference retailers should be cutting down on the amount of plastic used.

Between them the UK’s biggest supermarkets distribute some 15 billion plastic bags which end up in landfill.

Tesco is also contributing to deforestation through its reliance on palm oil , a cheap vegetable oil found in more than 1,000 products that the store sells. Palm oil plantations are now the major cause of rainforest clearance in Indonesia and Malaysia, threatening some of the world’s richest wildlife forests and endangering native species including the orang-utan. Tesco has failed to sign up to minimum standards for palm oil production or join a roundtable on sustainability in palm oil.

Friends of the Earth also warned that Tesco’s growth comes at the expense of smaller high street shops that are more likely to attract shoppers on foot and source food locally. Communities around the UK are opposing the opening of new Tesco stores. But Friends of the Earth says action is needed urgently from the Government and competition authorities to curb the retail giants power and growth and create an environment in which smaller retailers can flourish again. The environmental group also wants new legislation for companies which make them responsible for the environmental impacts of their business.

Bugger !

“I’m sure Tesco’s etc. are fully aware of the existence of railways, and the environmental advantages of rail over trucks, but they are not going to choose rail because that would eat into their bottom line.”

Actually it is the other way around, increasingly not using rail is eating into the bottom lines of plenty of businesses right now. The better economics of rail are becoming more apparent as oil continues to rise or stays above $70 a barrel. You might have missed it but the head of Mainfreight last week claimed that they could double their spend on freight from $25M to $50M a year (from memory) if Toll would pull its finger out and provide more capacity and he did it in the context of talking about rising road transport costs.

“I frequently find the real gap in Green politics is the idea that logic and reasonableness will win out.”

Certainly just coming up with the ideas and expecting people to adopt them is naive. That is why I think (and I guess you disagree since you appear to view the system as simply being broken) that engaging with mainstream business in terms they understand and finding ‘no regrets’ starting points (in particular around the costs of oil in the near term and of carbon footprint in the medium term) that link ‘green’ outcomes with business goals they can understand (brand equity, cost and risk reduction, business continuity etc.).

That hasn’t been done very well in the past, and traditional “Greens” seem to struggle with those types of conversations and the mainstream business types don’t know they need to have the conversation in the first place. However I personally see some evidence (outside of New Zealand) of large companies coming to the realization that the assumptions they had made, and built their business on, are no longer true and they are looking for ideas on how to change (UPS and FedEx are two examples, where they have been hit with rising oil costs pretty hard).

However, your suggestions for improving supermarkets seem to assume that they have arisen in their present form out of some sort of choice. Actually their form has been determined by the economic system they exist within.

Something that markets food in a sustainable way would be so far removed from the present ’supermarket’ as to be quite a different species of beast. You can insist on calling it a supermarket if you like, but it isn’t one.

Capitalism isn’t a result of people being stupid. You can sit down with them and explain alternatives until you are blue in the face, but it won’t do any good because they are already aware of these alternatives and rejected them in favour of methods that increase their profits. I’m sure Tesco’s etc. are fully aware of the existence of railways, and the environmental advantages of rail over trucks, but they are not going to choose rail because that would eat into their bottom line.

I frequently find the real gap in Green politics is the idea that logic and reasonableness will win out. The system you are trying to fix is irrational and just being right isn’t enough.

By the way, the point about butchers is that you have some sort of control over how things are packaged, and the polystyrene (?) trays are the real killers.

My issue with your initial response is that I subscribe (and I guess you do not) to the view that there is plenty that can be done within the current business environment. Sure some businesses will just have to do (Solid Energy for one) but for something like a supermarket, just saying ‘get rid of it’ I think isn’t the fastest way to get some change.

However you are right in that the current model of a supermarket, in fact the current model of how shopping is done, is oriented around long supply chains, roading, etc. that are unsustainable. And what Tesco have done is really just a start, and they deserve to be given a hard time on their business practices. However, I personally think, that the feedback should be; okay, great. now what about X, Y, Z.

Myself, I think there is huge scope for rethinking supermarkets; integration with public transport, sourcing of more local produce, moving transport to be rail rather than road where possible, locating within higher density housing, a real commitement to organics etc. that can be done within the existing model of a single store that people go into shop at.

So changing those things that are wrong with how food is produced and sold today I think should be seen as seperate to the idea of scraping the idea of a single store that provides multiple types of products in favor of smaller individual shops. In fact some of these things, e.g. getting suppliers to shift transport of goods from the 80% on the road as it is today to 80% on rail and getting a shift to bio fuels and hybrid-diesel engines for the final delivery from rail to store, those are things that might be done more quickly by a larger chain / corporate than individual shops.

But only someone sits down with these businesses and steps them through the reasons for doing it (both economic and broader social / environmental) as well as agitating against them from the outside (as happens with Tesco).

By the way, I also remember going into plenty of butchers shops as a kid and there was plenty of plastic wrap, I don’t think they have a monopoly on better ways of wrapping food.

A truly sustainable business by definition will not damage the environment and society that sustains it. They do exist, although they’re thin on the ground.

I agree that Tesco et al, do not come anywhere near the definition.

So, Frog. Firstly, as an activist I’ve spent my life having people tell me I was being unrealistic, so I’m used to it. I’m glad I never listened to them, because some of the things I was told we just had to be realistic about and accept don’t exist anymore. The whole point of political activism is to make the unrealistic possible. I’m even glad we didn’t give up fighting the Wellington motorway extension on the basis that people are going to build motorways, so we should be realistic and congratulate Transit for not making it as bad as it could have been.

A green supermarket is completely oxymoronic. To exist, because of their size supermarkets require a supply chain that reaches out huge distances, in the UK this can mean goods being trucked thousand s of kilometres, or being flown in from other continents. In order to displace their competitors, they need to force down the prices they pay to suppliers, which often means buying from developing countries, rather than using local goods (they can’t compete with the convenience of a local shop, so low prices are a necessity).

Their existence also presupposes a network of roads for allowing customers to drive to them. Wastage is also huge, as is packaging (for example meat has to sit in chillers, so is wrapped in film on a polystyrene tray, rather than wrapped in paper as required by a butcher).

Frankly, if you want to deal with climate change, you are going to have to accept that this requires real changes in our economic systems. If you are going to say “that’s not realistic in the forseeable future” you might as well give up now.

Right - and sustainable business is an oxymoron, nothing good can ever come from anything that isn’t a community led cooperative, we should just give up now and wait for the whole sorry mess to collapse under its own weight, while chanting from the side lines “I told you so, I told you so”.

And exactly how far is that going to get us?