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Now Business Green reports that the company [Tesco] is making a firm, long-term commitment to the fight against climate change. Specifically, that commitment includes a promise to slash its own operational greenhouse emissions 60% by 2025, and by 100% by 2050. It has also promised to run on 100% renewable energy by 2030. In the process, it became the first UK supermarket to have its climate change plans approved by the Science Based Targets (SBT) initiative.
Of course, even with these impressive goals, much remains to be done. As WWF's ['World Wide Fund for Nature' aka 'World Wildlife Fund'] head of climate and energy, Gareth Redmond-King, notes in the Business Green article, Tesco is a major retailer of gasoline and diesel due to the gas (petrol!) stations it runs at its stores. And a related commitment to slash supply chain emissions by only 17% by 2030 is not nearly as impressive as its own operational emissions targets.
Source: Treehugger.com
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday May 19 2017, @04:15PM (1 child)
Does this long term commitment come with any real commitments? Like a contract: til death do they part?
Has money been put into a trust or something to say: "Hey, if we renege we will donate all this money to WWF"?
Sounds like good publicity that is free and can be made to go away after a while.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Friday May 19 2017, @05:24PM
Apparently they're on track to meet their previous goals so there's some evidence this is in good faith:
Tesco's carbon footprint
Emissions from stores and DCs make-up over 85% of our direct carbon footprint. To meet our new targets, we commit to 100% renewable electricity by 2030.
Ten years ago, Tesco set climate change goals to:
1. Halve emissions per square foot of our stores and DCs by 2020.
2. Become a zero-carbon business by 2050.
We've invested over £700 million in energy and refrigeration efficiency in our stores and DCs since 2007. This has reduced emissions by 41% per square foot of our estate. We are on track to achieve our -50% target by 2020. Our efficiency improvements have also cut our electricity bill by £200 million per year. Energy efficiency is not only the responsible thing to do, it saves money too.
Our 50% 'relative' carbon reduction target translates into 10% 'absolute' reduction by 2020. This means we're on track to emit 10% less carbon from our estate in 2020 than we did in 2006. We are very proud of this achievement and will continue to invest in energy and refrigeration efficiency.
Yet, we recognise that this pace of decarbonisation does not put us on track to becoming a zero-carbon business by 2050. So today we publish tougher targets to help Tesco contribute to limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees.