Cawleys & Waitrose Awarded for Pioneering

Published - Monday, 15 February, 2010

The aspect of this award which is important for local businesses is that it is also for ‘demonstrating innovation and best practice which could be adopted by any company, large or small’.

The work that Waitrose and Cawleys have pioneered could help many other organisations who want to improve their green credentials easily and efficiently.

Commenting on the Awards Kate Cawley, Business Development Manager at Cawleys, said:  “Waitrose is the ‘gold standard’ in food waste management and we are delighted that this has been recognised through winning this award. The system can be adopted by any company large or small and through our extensive work with Waitrose, Cawleys has created a blueprint for best practice that any organisation can adopt -  that’s the beauty of the scheme.”

The award - recognising the retailer’s pioneering work with anaerobic digestion (AD)2 - comes as Waitrose commits a further 66 of its shops to the green scheme. 

Waitrose was the first UK food retailer to begin using AD in 2008.  This latest step will mean that, by May, over half its shops will send their waste food to be converted in to energy and fed in to the national grid - a higher amount than any other retailer.  To-date, Waitrose has generated a total of 400 MWhrs of electricity through AD, enough to boil almost eight million kettles.

AD eliminates the need to send waste to landfill sites - a process which emits methane gas into the atmosphere and contributes towards global warming.  The retailer has already diverted 50% of its total operational waste away from landfill and this move will help significantly towards its goal of diverting 95% by 2013.

Waitrose Recycling & Waste manager, Arthur Sayer says: “We work to reduce the amount of waste we produce as its not in our business interest to produce any waste at all.   Inevitably though some food waste does occur and AD  has proven to be a sustainable way of eliminating the need to send it to landfill, reducing our impact on the environment and creating renewable energy along the way.  This recognition of our work with Cawleys comes at an exciting time as we extend AD to more of our shops.”