Sainsbury’s has, this week, launched two initiatives – one involving bees, another involving scientists – in a bid to find solutions to environmental challenges facing the supermarket, its farmers and customers.
Today, the retailer announced it has set to work hundreds of
bees at its new store in
Dursley, Gloucestershire, to both help tackle the decline in the bee population and help pollinate commercial crops in one of the main fruit and vegetable growing areas in the country.
The bee recruitment follows yesterday’s announcement by
Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King that the supermarket was partnering with scientists at Imperial College London in a five-year
research and development (R&D) project, this time focusing on how Sainsbury’s stores of the future might be able to deliver practical solutions to the environmental challenges facing the supermarket and its customers.
Dursley store home to eight bee 'hotels'The Dursley store bees will be housed in eight bee ‘hotels’, made from sustainably sourced timber and
recycled materials. The hotels are just one of a number of green features designed into the new store, which will also collect rainwater for use in toilets and to irrigate plants. Special reflective pipes in the roof will make maximum use of natural daylight, reducing the need for artificial lighting, while cool air from food chillers will be recycled to keep the store cool in summer.
Bees are essential to pollinate around 80 of the 110 food crops grown commercially, and it is feared their dwindling population could severally limit food production in the future.
Sainsbury’s said several of the bee species being given a new home by the initiative are on the endangered list, while some have not been recorded in Gloucestershire for the last 10 years.
“The rapid decline in bee population has had a severe impact upon the productivity of British crops, so we have decided to take practical steps to help,” said Sainsbury’s Environment manager, Jack Cunningham. “Sainsbury’s already has a loyalty scheme where customers can collect Nectar points, so enabling bees to collect the real thing makes perfect sense.”
The
R&D partnership, announced yesterday, has been struck with Imperial College London’s Faculty of Engineering and Grantham Institute for Climate Change. The aim of this initiative is to seek out solutions to a looming
energy crisis as well as addressing
water scarcity issues.
R&D partnership will look at how to heat Sainsbury's customers' homesSolutions that will be researched include finding ways to heat and recycle water to customers’ homes, ways to manage waste streams for customers and taking Sainsbury’s stores off grid. As well as reducing the supermarket and its customers’ reliance on a strained UK power network, Sainsbury’s said it would help reduce the retailer’s
carbon footprint “dramatically”.
King, who unveiled the R&D project at yesterday’s Base business sustainability conference at London’s ExCeL, said Sainsbury’s was investing in the R&D project not to “do good” but to get a competitive advantage on other retailers.
“Respect for the environment does require collaboration [with others in the industry] but we are seeking a competitive advantage,” he said, adding that the supermarket had negotiated to part own the intellectual property of any ideas generated from the research because corporate responsibility was such a "competitive issue”.
King said a survey of its 19 million customers, highlighted seven corporate responsibility issues that were most important to them. They included packaging, waste, responsible sourcing, buying British, being fair to employees, animal welfare and a fair deal to suppliers. “It is our ambition to lead on all seven,” he said.
Yesterday, the chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, Charlie Mayfield, revealed that the company planned to open its
first off-grid store before the end of the year as part of its carbon reduction commitment.
Related news:Green business & operations newsGreen R&D newsSustainable food newsRelated links:www.jsainsbury.co.uk/cr