Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
238-239)
MR JULIAN
WALKER-PALIN,
MS GEMMA
LACEY, MR
ARTHUR SAYER
AND MR
RICHARD WHITEFIELD
19 NOVEMBER 2008
Q238 Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies
and gentlemen, and welcome to a further evidence session in the
Committee's inquiry into the Waste Strategy for England 2007.
Can I, for our first session, formally welcome from ASDA Julian
Walker-Palin, who is the Head of Corporate Policy for Sustainability
and Ethics, and from the John Lewis Partnership Gemma Lacey, who
is the Project Manager for Corporate Social Responsibility, and
Mr Arthur Sayer, who is the Manager for Recycling and Waste, and
from a smaller company, Brecknell Willis, Mr Richard Whitefield,
who is their Production Manager. You are all very welcome and
thank you very much for your contribution in helping us to prepare
for this session. As far as ASDA is concerned, I thought we could
abandon ship on this inquiry when I read in the Daily Telegraph
of 27 October a headline which said, "My plan to create a
zero waste UK" under the authorship of Mr Andy Bond, the
Chief Executive of ASDA. I thought, "Who is this man who
is miraculously going to banish all waste from the United Kingdom
and do it so quickly?" But then I realised it was a little
bit more complicated, so for the sake of clarification this was
perhaps not ridding the whole country of waste but just ASDA,
is that right?
Mr Walker-Palin: Yes, that is
right, in particular our operational waste from our stores.
Q239 Chairman: Right. It was a very
ambitious and a very interesting idea which he put forward. In
terms of sending zero waste from your business to landfill, perhaps
you could just talk about that. First of all, how did you decide
to do it, because by definition it must be feasible if you have
made these very strong public statements on the achievability
of that objective? Just take us through the thinking which led
you to that conclusion.
Mr Walker-Palin: Okay. In 2005
Wal-Mart, the company which owns us, decided on three main environmental
objectives they were going to head towards over the next few years
and they were deliberately aspirational goals, one of which was
to create zero waste. So we took away the aspirational goal of
creating zero waste, took advice from our main waste contractors,
who are Veolia Environmental Services, and said, "Actually,
how do we translate that for the UK to make a real difference
in terms of the amount we are sending to landfill and the carbon
emissions from our operation?" We kicked around the feasibility
of creating zero waste and believe that as things stand at the
moment it is a very, very difficult aspirational goal to achieve.
So we said, "We will take it in a number of stages,"
and the first stage we took was to send zero waste to landfill
from our operational business by the end of 2010. In order to
achieve that we started to extend our network of what we call
ASDA service centres, which are recycling depots around the UK,
of which we now have eight, and the premise is that when a lorry
delivers to our stores and it delivers the goods, it is then empty.
So what we now do is we put the waste (certain types of waste
so far) onto the lorry, which then drives back to its distribution
centre, then next to the main distribution centres we built this
ASDA service centres, these recycling depots. Therefore, they
can offload the waste, go on to the standard distribution centre,
fill up with goods for the next store, and so on. So we are able
to actually backhaul waste without any additional carbon being
produced. So when we had that backbone we said, "What are
the materials that we need to go after first of all?" and
we looked at a lot of cardboard and plastic which is used within
our business for what is called retail ready packaging, which
is to save productivity on the sales floor we have a lot of our
goods which are within, for example, cardboard cases and you would
remove the top of the cardboard case and slide the whole thing
onto the shelf. It therefore gives you a display unit for the
goods in a much quicker way and because we are serving at the
moment 17 million customers a week we really need to get the goods
on our shelves. But what that leaves you with is this shroud of
cardboard or a shroud of plastic and we said, "Well, actually
it's no good putting that into the compactor and then sending
it to landfill," again for economic reasons as well as for
environmental reasons, because these materials normally have a
value. We are in a slightly strange situation at the moment where
the values have dropped out, but they would normally have a value.
So we worked out a process whereby we would backhaul, using the
ASDA service centre network, cardboard and plastic and we then
rolled that out across all of our stores with the exception of
the south-west region, where we are still building our ASDA service
centre. That will come online as soon as we finish construction
there. We then looked at the different waste that we had around
the store and we have a number of hazardous wastes. Where we have
pharmacies, opticians or photo labs, we have a number of waste
materials which you obviously have to be very careful of, which
have certain legal requirements. So we brought Wastecare in to
actually take those away on a store by store basis, but the idea
is we would like to backhaul those again to the ASDA service centres.
Then the real key in getting to zero waste was that at the beginning
of this year we said, "Well, we are currently now with all
of those processes 65% diverted from landfill." We looked
then at the majority of the waste which was going in our compactors
and found that it was biodegradable waste, so it was bakery products
which had not been sold as produce, ready meals, or that kind
of waste. We extrapolated that if we were able to remove that
from landfill, and obviously the enormous amounts of methane which
are produced when it breaks down, that would get us up to 90%
diverted. So currently in six stores we backhaul all the biodegradable
waste to our service centre in Skelmersdale in the North of England,
where we bulk it up and then currently it is burnt as solid fuel.
We are looking now to roll that out to 20 stores, and in fact
got approval last week to do so, and to automate the process at
the ASDA service centre. As soon as we get to 20 stores, which
will be in about March next year, we can then confirm for certain
that it is of the scale we can roll out across all of our stores
and it is our intention to then roll that out across our whole
business by the end of next year. At the same time as we roll
that out, we will roll out the recycling of customer materials
and cafe«s, so PET bottles, paper, aluminium cans, those
kinds of materials. Our target for next year is to get ourselves
to 95% diverted with 12 months left then for the final 5%. However,
we have worked on two stores, one in Horwich and one in Bootle,
both in the North of England, where we are currently at 99% diverted
from landfill. We are still working out how sustainable that process
is, but in essence we have demonstrated that you can just about
get to 100% and the last 1% is very, very difficult material.
If you sweep up in the car park and you have got these sweepings
from the floor, technically that is our operational waste but
actually where do you send it if you are not going to landfill
it? So ourselves and Veolia and certainly scratching our heads
and saying, "What do you do with some of those strange materials
left when you have done all the rest of them?" So that is
our model which will get us to zero waste to landfill.
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