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Commitments

Halve the impact of our refrigeration and cooling direct CO2e emissions by 2012 (relative to 2008 baseline).

Reduce water use per square foot trading fl oor area by 20% by 2012 (relative to 2008 baseline).


“For the past 15 years, we’ve kept up with changing legislation, moving from ozone-depleting CFC-based refrigeration systems to using HFCs. But with our decision to move to natural refrigerants, we’re now setting trends, not following them.”

Nigel Keen, Director of Building & Services


Doing IT by the book:

Illustrating the expertise and dedication of our Partners, Gary Hird, Strategy Manager, Computer Services, is also the author of Green IT in Practice, published in September 2008. The book is a guide to setting up a green IT programme, how it can reduce a company’s carbon footprint, and the importance of engaging employees and suppliers. Putting this into practice the Partnership has a programme of sustainable IT initiatives, which has so far included: server and desktop ‘virtualisation’; ensuring new hardware is ‘gold’-rated by the Electronic Product Environmental assessment Tool (EPEaT); and greening our data centre. The Partnership is a founder member of the cross-industry Environmental iT leadership Team, run in conjunction with the charity Global Action Plan.


17.5% approximate energy saved by cooling our data centre to 24.5°C rather than 21°C


Freezing our emissions

Currently, around 16% of our total Partnership carbon footprint comes from the release of refrigerant gases, with Waitrose’s refrigeration the biggest source of these emissions. Demonstrating the importance of this issue, we have recently committed to halve the impact of our refrigeration and cooling direct emissions by 2012 compared to 2008 levels, and have begun a three-year programme to achieve this challenging target.

We are introducing sub-metering for refrigeration, as well as lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HvAC), as standard in our new Waitrose shops. We have also taken the decision not to use high global warming potential hydrofl uorocarbon (HFC) gas for refrigeration in all new shops and major refurbishments from 2010 onwards. To achieve this, we have developed, and are implementing, a new refrigeration system that uses a propane-based natural refrigerant, which will cut our carbon footprint by 20%. The fi rst new store to utilise this system, Waitrose Altrincham, opened in October this year.

In addition, our fi ve-year £55 million programme to phase out ozone-depleting hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) refrigerants by the end of 2009 is on track to be completed on time. This has contributed signifi cantly to improving our shop energy effi ciency through the use of more energy-effi cient refrigerated cabinets, secondary door curtains fi tted on our walk-in coldrooms and night blinds fi tted to all chilled cabinets.

Changes in the pipeline

We are not big users of water, but still recognise the need to actively manage our consumption. Our total water usage has increased by 14% since 2007/08 to just over 1.33 million m3 in 2008/09. Our shop water consumption is equivalent to 0.13m3 per square foot trading fl oor area in John Lewis, and 0.16m3 in Waitrose in 2008/09. Our target is to achieve a 20% reduction by 2012.

A review of our estate highlighted that only a few of our shops had meters that could be read remotely. In 2009, we made the decision to install additional water meters in all existing shops, allowing accurate, real-time water usage to be reported and used to inform our programme of water-reduction measures. This work is due to be completed in January 2010.

To support our efforts, we have enlisted the help of a number of water specialists who have carried out several shop surveys. Following their recommendations, we are reviewing all taps and water-using equipment and trialling waterless urinals, low-flush cisterns and rainwater harvesting. Additional areas of focus will include ice disposal from fish counters, and Partner and customer catering operations.


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