Asda Wal-Mart, the UK's second largest food retailer, will stop sending any waste produced by its 307 food stores to landfill sites by 2010, as part of wider campaign to become a more environmentally efficient organization.
The chain’s commitment to lessening its negative impact on the environment means that by 2010 everything the supermarket disposes of at the back of its stores will be recycled, reused or composted instead of being sent to landfill.
The Leeds-based group has also embarked on a complete review of its own label packaging to reduce the amount of household rubbish which shoppers throw away each year. The retailer plans to redesign the packaging over the next 18 months in a bid to reduce both the weight and volume of packaging it produces by a minimum of 10%.
This move follows the redesign of all salad bags reducing the thickness of the plastic by 15%, and removal of unnecessary cardboard sleeves on a selection of its ready meals.
We’re determined to stop sending stuff from our stores to landfill sites. We also want to help our customers reduce the amount of rubbish they throw away each week, said David Cheesewright, COO at Asda.
We hope our competitors will follow our lead so that together we can help make landfill sites redundant, he added.
Last year Asda opened four purpose-built recycling facilities at a cost of GBP32 million in Lutterworth, Wakefield, Skelmersdale and Bedford, enabling its fleet of delivery trucks to collect cardboard and plastic packaging from the back of stores.