Waste is not only damaging to the planet, drawing on scarce resources and placing a burden on disposal, but it adds costs for businesses and consumers.

Our webinar with BRC members looked at eliminating waste from business operations but also encouraging consumers to be more conscious of the use and re-use of products.

Tesco colleagues William Guest and Stuart Muir joined us to speak about the company's redistribution of surplus food whilst Halford's ESG Manager Dan Boyle highlighted how they have been recycling, reusing and exchanging through a range of projects.

SPEAKERS

  • Nicki Hunt, Project Manager Climate Action, BRC
  • Stuart Muir, Zero Food Waste Manager, Tesco
  • William Guest, Sustainable Packaging Manager, Tesco
  • Dan Boyle, ESG Manager, Halfords
Didn’t get a chance to join us live? No problem - you can watch the event on-demand below.
A big thank you to our colleagues at Tesco, Halfords, and to everyone who joined.

WATCH ON-DEMAND

Why should retailers reduce waste?

One in nine people go hungry around the world – yet, despite this, one-third of all food produced is wasted. This dramatic figure contributes to $940 billion in losses each year.

As well as this, wasted food makes up 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions each year. Not only does the overproduction and wasting of food lead to financial and social losses, but it also slowly degrades our planet. Retailers aiming to hit the BRC Climate Action Roadmap target of net zero by 2040 should home in on reducing waste in retail operations.

 

Understanding retail waste

Types of waste in retail operations

Two of the most prevalent types of waste in retail operations, especially for food vendors and supermarket chains, are food and packaging. The two go hand in hand, but ensuring both aspects of waste are as sustainable as possible requires vastly different operations.

As well as making it easier for their customers to use up the food they buy, Tesco’s packaging team works to ensure as much of their packaging as possible is easy for customers to reuse and recycle. This means incorporating materials such as glass, steel, aluminium, cardboard, and paper.

To learn more about the complex regulations around specific materials and how Tesco’s packaging works in line with them, watch the full webinar on demand.

For businesses that do repairs and maintenance on their products, such as Halfords, there is the double-edged sword that is product repair waste. While providing repairs extends the lifecycle of products, Halfords found that over 75% of its overall retail waste was comprised of replacement parts and repairs – compared to just 18% caused by packaging and transporting stock.

 

Best practice for reducing waste in retail operations

Strategies for reducing food waste in retail

Speakers from Tesco’s highlighted a handful of proven strategies to reduce food waste in your retail operations, such as:

  • Avoiding placing buy-one-get-one-free offers on fruit and veg, discouraging customers from buying excess produce and allowing it to rot in the back of the fridge
  • Prioritising “best before” dates over “use by” dates
  • Educating customers on how to use sight, smell and touch to determine if food is safe to eat
  • Encouraging community-wide change through events like Use Up Days
  • Donating excess food to charity

In the full webinar, Stuart goes into further detail on Tesco’s life cycle for its products in order to avoid food waste, exploring how they managed to reduce their food waste percentage to just 0.35%.

Strategies for reducing packaging waste in retail

Tesco aligns its strategy for reducing packaging waste with the four R’s:

  • Remove it where we can – for example, by selling loose produce rather than in plastic containers
  • Reduce it where we can’t – shrinking the size of packaging, or reducing the amount of non-recyclable materials in the packaging
  • Reuse more – considering whether materials at the end of one part of their lifecycle can be repurposed
  • Recycle what’s left

Not only does this strategy inform their retail operations, but it also provides consumers with a framework once they have taken their products home. Tesco has implemented recycling collection within several of their stores, collecting over 2000 tonnes of soft plastic to be reused, and is currently exploring the potential of refillable packaging to further drive waste down.

Find more detail about the data-proven strategies Tesco is using to reduce packaging waste in the full online event.

Strategies for reducing product waste in retail

Halfords combines recycling with refurbishment and reuse to extend the lifecycle of products and materials. From this, they presented a number of strategies they have used to make it easier to reduce product waste in retail:

  • Providing public recycling for their customers – making it easier for consumers to recycle materials
  • Identifying and recycling the materials in products – by building with simple recyclable materials, items such as bike parts and windshield wipers can be recycled
  • Bike exchange – not only do Halfords recycle the materials in bikes, but they also refurbish second-hand bikes and donate them to charities, giving used bikes a second lease on life

For more information on these strategies and the results-driven case studies that support them, watch the full session.