Waitrose awarded for pioneering ‘food to fuel’ technology
Waitrose has received an award from the Association for Organics Recycling (AFOR) for its industry-leading measures to convert leftover food into renewable energy.
The award, recognising the retailer’s pioneering work with anaerobic digestion (AD), comes as Waitrose commits a further 66 of its shops to the green scheme. It was won in partnership with recycling experts, Cawleys.
Waitrose was the first UK food retailer to begin using AD in 2008. This latest step will mean that, by May, over half its shops will send their waste food to be converted in to energy and fed in to the national grid - a higher amount than any other retailer. To date, Waitrose has generated a total of 400 MWhrs of electricity through AD, enough to boil almost eight million kettles.
AD eliminates the need to send waste to landfill sites - a process which emits methane gas into the atmosphere and contributes towards global warming. The retailer has already diverted 50% of its total operational waste away from landfill and this move will help significantly towards its goal of diverting 95% by 2013.
Waitrose recycling & waste manager, Arthur Sayer said: “We work to reduce the amount of waste we produce as it’s not in our business interest to produce any waste at all. Inevitably though some food waste does occur and AD has proven to be a sustainable way of eliminating the need to send it to landfill, reducing our impact on the environment and creating renewable energy along the way. This recognition comes at an exciting time as we extend AD to more of our shops”.
Jon Cawley, managing director of Cawleys added: “Waitrose has pioneered the use of anaerobic digestion in the retail market, showing that retailers can make positive environmental changes at all stages in the food chain, treating food waste management as seriously as food sourcing.
“AD creates a positive circle whereby food waste can be recycled back to fertiliser for the land, in a process which produces renewable energy, and avoids sending waste to landfill. AD creates a positive circle whereby food waste can be recycled back to fertiliser for the land, in a process which produces renewable energy, and avoids sending waste to landfill where it can produce greenhouse gases. Waitrose has worked very hard with us to make the food recycling service work and we are delighted to be working with them to convert over half of their estate to using AD”.
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