Supermarkets Carbon Benchmark Report
There have been many attempts to compare companies’ performance on sustainability issues – BitC, FTSE4Good, Dow Jones Sustainability Index among others. While these initiatives have their value, attempting to compare hundreds of often quite different companies on a dozen or more different CSR issues, using a relatively simple set of indicators inevitably has its limitations. In particular, these projects tend to measure the existence of polices and systems rather than actual performance. To try to get beyond this, we’ve recently completed a project supported by Asda, M&S, Tesco and Waitrose to make detailed comparisons of their performance on climate change.
This project used a series of carefully tailored key performance indicators on store energy efficiency, refrigerant-gas leakage, and distribution efficiency, as well as qualitative metrics to compare carbon reduction targets, supply chain carbon management, customer carbon activity.
The benchmark produced some pretty interesting results. For example, it revealed that the most efficient company (who must remain nameless due to the confidentiality requirements of the project) used less than 50% of the energy/sq ft used by the least efficient for HVAC (heating/ventilation/air-conditioning) – probably due, in part, to a more aggressive capital expenditure programme. We found similarly high carbon efficiency variations in other areas – lighting and distribution in particular. And some companies seem to have much bolder carbon reduction targets than others (see chart).
The extent of these differences was surprising to the companies involved and provides useful information for the development of their carbon management programmes. Given the project was a first attempt, there are quite a few improvements to be made in the methodology - in particular we'd like to develop better metrics to evaluate the supply chain carbon management performance, given its relative significance for the sector.
We hope to do a second iteration in 2010. We are also looking to broaden participation across the retail sector. Please get in touch if you would like to request a free copy of the full report – research@endscarbon.com
