Energised colleagues save £2 million in carbon

Energised colleagues save £2 million in carbon

Sainsbury’s colleagues nationwide have been enthused by our ‘Greenest Grocer’ campaign to take simple steps to save energy.

Greenest Grocer encourages colleagues to take responsibility for energy saving, with simple changes in behaviour. Following a successful pilot, in 2016, we rolled out the campaign across all our 1,300 stores.

The key behavioural changes include closing fridge doors, turning down ovens and hotplates at the right time, and not overfilling freezers – which pushes cold air out in to aisles (and makes stores less pleasant for customers, too).

Since the campaign launch, we’ve saved £2 million from store budgets. That’s equivalent to nearly 8,000 tonnes of CO2e – enough to fill Big Ben more than 900 times.

Intensive training

The Greenest Grocer campaign involved an intensive national training programme, kicking off with a six-week series of regional training and sharing sessions for managers.

Five seconded store managers, who were passionate about Greenest Grocer, helped deliver the sessions – making the messages more credible.

£2m

saved from store budgets since the start of the Greenest Grocer campaign.

Managers learnt about the earlier savings experienced by pilot regions, which had seen energy use go down by between 2 per cent and 10 per cent. Through our ‘league table’ energy reports colleagues engaged in friendly competition to see who could save the most energy in each region. These colleague-driven actions in stores helped to achieve our overarching £2 million target.

To help get the message out to colleagues, we used communication materials such as posters, stickers and activity ideas. And, of course, we encouraged colleagues to apply energy-saving ideas of their own.

Still going strong

The Greenest Grocer campaign is still going – and growing – strong. In 2017/18, we intend to re-engage colleagues, giving more detail on how we use energy.

We also plan to extend the programme to depots and offices – and to cover additional areas such as saving water and reducing waste.