John Lewis Partnership plc annual report and accounts 2012

Business review Resources and relationships (continued)

Environment (continued)

 • Refrigeration

 Waitrose stopped using hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) for refrigeration in all new and refitted shops from 2010. 74 shops had our new low carbon refrigeration system installed by the end of 2011/12. As a result of this new system and our leakage reduction programme, Waitrose’s direct refrigeration and cooling CO2 equivalent emissions have been reduced by 5.3% since last year and 24.5% since our 2008/09 baseline.

• Waste

 We diverted 89% of our operational waste from landfill last year, by segregating more recyclable material by source, recovering energy from unavoidable food waste in an increasing number of shops, and processing general waste through Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) to extract recyclable elements from the residual, unsegregated waste. During 2011, a suite of new recycling bins were installed in most Partner dining rooms to capture a larger proportion of recyclable waste such as vending drinks bottles, disposable cups, newspapers and magazines.

• Water

 We continue to introduce automatic metering; the majority of our retail and non-trading sites now have this technology. The Partnership delivered an improvement of 23.5% over the prior year in Waitrose in shop water consumption per square foot of trading floor area. However John Lewis water consumption increased by 9.1% to 0.12m3 per square foot of trading floor area.

Responsible development

Our Responsible Development Framework details our approach to the development and refurbishment of our shops, offices and warehouses which can be found on the Partnership website www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/csr/our-environment/responsible-development.html.

New construction sites continue to be registered and regularly assessed under the Considerate Constructors Scheme. Our new Waitrose shop in Stratford City was awarded BREEAM ‘Outstanding’; the first BREEAM post construction ‘Outstanding’ rated retail building in the world.

Packaging

 We place over 130,000 tonnes of product packaging on the market each year.We contribute towards investment in domestic collection and public recycling centres, promote packaging recyclability and explore ways to optimise our packaging. More information is available on our website, www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/csr/our-environment/minimising-packaging.html.

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