A cycle of recycling

Zero waste to landfill is the target many retailers are setting themselves. Minimising product waste, creating partnerships and generating energy from waste is helping them to achieve this. And efficient waste management processes not only cut costs but can allow retailers to make money from recyclables.

Asda’s target is to reach zero landfill by the end of this year. Marks & Spencer’s commitment as part of Plan A is to reduce its operational waste by a quarter and construction waste by half by 2012, and eventually reach zero waste to landfill. Waitrose is working towards its goal of diverting 95% of operational waste away from landfill by 2013.

The Government isn’t allowing any new landfill sites to be commissioned. And with the costs of sending waste to landfill increasing year on year - due to the landfill tax and rising costs of fuel - it is no wonder retailers have begun to set themselves such tough targets. So what are they doing?

Ikea generates £30,000 in revenue for each store from the materials it is recycling. This has meant that even while it has increased its number of stores, it has reduced its overall waste disposal costs. In 2008, Ikea had 11 stores and spent £900,000 on waste, while last year 19 stores cost £700,000.

Baling equipment bundles materials like cardboard and paper, which is then sent off for processing to a production facility or paper mill, for example. This is part of the recycling equipment that all Ikea’s new stores now open with. A recycling facility in Ikea’s new Dublin store enables it to recycle up to 90% of all its waste.

At the same time Ikea is able to reduce markdowns and maximise product sold with two other initiatives. It has invested to bring an £80,000 cardboard repackaging machine for products at three of its stores, in Wembley, Edmonton and Lakeside by September this year. The machine makes a new box for any packaging damaged internally and re-labels it. “In our bargain corner, we have to sell at a price reduction of 30%, but when goods are repackaged we can sell them at full price,” says Ikea corporate sustainability manager Charlie Browne.

In addition, a recovery team of 10 to 12 staff also repairs damaged and returned products in-store so that they can be put on sale in the bargain corner. Sales from the bargain corner can contribute up to 10% of Ikea’s net profit and generates £800,000 of revenue in each store over a year.

This effort of minimising waste and having an efficient waste management policy extends to having a full-time environmental specialist in each store. Their role is to drive targets and oversee training, implementation and monitor key performance indicators.

Waste away

Not only are retailers reducing the waste they directly produce, they are also reducing consumer waste too. M&S will announce three deals with local councils this year. This means about an additional 60,000 tonnes of material, the equivalent of the food packaging generated by M&S, will be recycled in the UK every year.

M&S has already completed one of these deals, investing £1.3m over five years to improve Somerset’s recycling facilities. This will go towards more and bigger lorries and adding plastics and cardboard - which are hard to recycle because of the size - to the materials the local council collects from the kerbside. It will also increase the manpower and resources to run these services. A quarter of the additional material collected will be diverted back into the M&S packaging supply chain.

M&S head of packaging Dr Helene Roberts says: “In order that we move to the next level, which is making more of our packaging with recycled content, we need more materials at a higher quality collected at the kerbside and made available to our suppliers. We are tackling this problem by providing funding directly to the people that can make a difference - local authorities.”

The use of anaerobic digestion to generate energy from waste is another way retailers divert materials back into a supply chain. Waitrose is on track to fulfil its pledge to source 100% of its electricity from green sources by expanding its anaerobic digestion processes. By May this year, Waitrose will send its food waste from 115 of its branches, more than half of its estate, to an anaerobic digestion plant in Bedford where it is converted into renewable energy, which goes back into the national grid. Waitrose began sending food waste there from five of its stores in 2008, and then rolled this out to a further 49 stores last year.

Waitrose recycling and waste manager Arthur Sayer says: “Anaerobic digestion is relatively quick and easy for our shops to achieve, with very few changes needed on a day-to-day basis.” This is a process other grocers use, with all of Asda’s food waste diverted to processing by anaerobic digestion.

None of Sainsbury’s supermarkets send food waste to landfill. A Sainsbury’s spokesperson says: “We are now focused on making anaerobic digestion our sole way of generating energy from food waste by 2012. We currently use a number of different processes. We need the amount of anaerobic digestion available in the UK to increase before we can make this a reality.”

These challenges in the infrastructure available are what retailers have to overcome. Waitrose head of corporate social responsibility Gemma Lacey says: “The only thing preventing us from rolling anaerobic digestion out to all our branches is that there are few anaerobic digestion plants in this country and we are currently working on finding a solution to this.”

Land Securities has a similar challenge to overcome with its task to provide a waste disposal service to the retailers in its 25 centres across the UK. Land Securities environmental director Dave Farebrother says: “It depends on the geographical location to an automatic sorting waste recovery facility as to whether waste is sorted into different streams on-site. All our London centres send away mixed waste because they are close to a facility.”

Either shop staff put waste into bins behind stores in the service yard or they take it into a common area and empty it into the bins. Farebrother says there is the risk of cross-contamination as soon as staff segregate waste streams on site. However, the problem of proximity to a facility will become less of an issue as more waste recovery facilities are built over the coming years, he adds.

So whether the challenge is helping reduce consumer waste or the lack of facilities available, retailers are pushing towards their goals of reducing waste sent to landfill in order to cut costs and help the environment too.