Green Grocers
Dan Welch, Co-editor of Ethical Consumer magazine, asks who’s top of the food chain in the UK supermarket sector.
For many environmentalists supermarkets are a bête noire, palaces of unsustainable consumerism where the carbon-heavy, out-of-season fruits of our globalised economy are disgorged into the waiting car boots of wasteful consumers. At the same time, the UK’s biggest retailers are battling it out for the title of ‘greenest’ supermarket, with it seems new eco-initiatives launched every week.
This paradox is nowhere better illustrated than by Wal-Mart (owner of the UK’s ASDA and Netto), long the target of campaigners of every stripe. Wal-Mart’s CEO announced in 2005 to general incredulity that the big-box monster of American retail was going green and pledged to be a “good steward for the environment”. Whilst many expected greenwash, Wal-Mart’s sustainability programme started attracting support from green luminaries like Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Adam Werbach, former head of the Sierra Club, the US’ biggest environmental group. The Wal-Mart conversion showed that huge change was afoot in the sector.
Supermarket share of the UK grocery market has been steadily rising. At the beginning of the 1990s, the UK’s then ‘big four’ took just under half of the British shopper’s spending on
food.Today, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons control around three quarters of our grocery market. Tesco in particular has shown extraordinary growth, now taking a staggering one in every three pounds spent on groceries in the UK.
For Helen Rimmer, Friends of the Earth Food Campaigner and spokesperson for anti-supermarket group Tescopoly, with a handful of companies dominating food retail, the real question is “What has supermarket domination meant for the true champions of our food system, the small farmers and the independent shop owners who provide us with sustainable, healthy and affordable food?” For Rimmer the answer is clear: “The costs of supermarkets’ aggressive expansion are being felt by small businesses, farmers and the environment. In recent times 2,000 independent grocers have closed down every year.”
But isn’t the flip side of that dominance that sustainability initiatives from the big players could have a huge impact? In the US Wal-Mart introduced a sustainability scorecard for its buyers, bringing sustainability metrics into the |32| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE
heart of its sourcing practices. And with Wal-Mart representing 3% of the US’ GDP that’s a lot of supply chain. Charles Craypo, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Notre Dame University, who has followed Wal-Mart’s ‘greening’ in detail thinks there are clear limits – on the bottom line. Beyond the win-win of ‘low hanging fruit’ Craypo notes that “long-time bad habits” remain, such as allowing toxic run-off at its construction sites. It’s cheaper to pay the fines than change the practice.
“A typical supermarket contains no fewer than 30,000 items. About half of those items are produced by 10 multinational food and beverage companies,” notes Paul Squires of the New Economics Foundation. And this model, according to Squires, is fundamentally unsustainable: “Redesigning our high streets to support a low carbon-future means ultimately displacing retail chains (as large users of carbon) and replacing them with locally-embedded alternatives.”
The protestors blockade of fuel refineries and distribution depots which brought the country to a near standstill in 2000 revealed just how vulnerable reliance on a few very large chain retailers has left our local economies and communities, according to Squires: “The fragile foundation of our over-reliance on oil and highly centralised distribution systems, lay starkly exposed. Another three days of protests, supermarket bosses claimed, would have left their shelves empty. We were, in effect, only nine meals from anarchy.”
Environmental Reporting But the reality for most of us is that the bulk of our weekly shop will be done in supermarkets. Can consumers trust the big supermarkets’ claims to be going green? Ethical Consumer is currently completing a study of the sector’s sustainability performance, the results of which will be out before Christmas. This research builds on a report on the supermarket sector we conducted last year – where the ‘Best Buys’ across all ethical and environmental criteria were The Co-operative, M&S and Waitrose, plus Budgens and Londis for the smaller convenience stores.
Key to credible environmental performance is robust, transparent – and publicly available – environmental reporting. Ethical Consumer reviewed the environmental reporting of 18 retail brands in the UK grocery retail sector, including convenience stores like Londis,
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