Trends Green Companies

The retailer has announced a strengthening in the environmental standards required by its 14,000 fresh produce growers, by implementing the LEAF Marque environmental assurance scheme across its entire global produce supply chain.

Tesco will ensure all UK growers are certified by the end of 2022 and will begin the process of certifying the rest of its global grower base from 2023, with the aim of completing the transformation by 2025. The scale of the roll-out is unprecedented among LEAF’s existing supply base.

The LEAF Marque, run by global farming organisation LEAF (Linking Environment And Farming), requires farms to take a whole business approach to delivering more sustainable, climate positive farming through:

• Resilient and diverse businesses
• Increased imple­men­ta­tion of regen­er­a­tive practices
• Improved pos­i­tive action for cli­mate change through energy efficiency and reduced car­bon footprints
• Improved soil man­age­ment to enhance soil qual­i­ty and soil health
• Improved imple­men­ta­tion of effec­tiveIPM solu­tions for crop health and protection
• Cir­cu­lar approaches to resource use and waste management
• Improved man­age­ment of water use and water quality
• Enriched diver­si­ty of native habi­tats and species

Tesco has reduced the materials used each year in its packaging by more than 2000 tonnes and recently launched reusable packaging service Loop in ten stores and new soft plastic recycling facilities across all large stores. Tesco and Faerch have developed a closed loop recycling solution that ensures the secondary plastic packaging used to transport and hold products on Tesco shelves is retained by the food packaging industry and recycled back into new food contact primary packaging.

Until recently, PET shelf ready packaging – widely used by UK supermarkets to transport products – was used once and downcycled into non-food applications. Now, through a new ‘tray to tray’ initiative, Tesco’s secondary PET will be collected by Faerch and through their advanced recycling process used to make new, food contact PET pots, tubs and trays.

Packaging for Tesco’s own brand cut fruit, selected yoghurts and meat will be guaranteed to contain 30% rPET that originated in Tesco stores. To achieve this, Tesco will require all its own brand and branded suppliers to use food contact approved PET for shelf ready packaging.

When we speak of success, it invariably means scale because scale brings lower costs and higher profit.
Scalability is about capacity and capability. When a business needs to grow, companies first build internal capacity to handle scale i.e. if you want to increase your retail business, you create more warehousing space, increase the channels of reaching your customers and look at sourcing more products. Next, the company needs to build capability i.e. help your people handle a larger, complex operation by giving them necessary training and tools such as software that can manage inventory and sales and hardware to support it. Technology makes it easier and less expensive to scale a business. You can gain huge economies of scale and more throughput, with less labour, if you invest wisely in technology. Scaling a business means setting the stage to enable and support growth in your company.

• Scaling #ESG isn’t quite as simple.
• ESG isn’t a single process
• ESG isn’t a technology
• ESG isn’t a campaign

So when someone in leadership at a board meeting says, “How do we scale this?” Ask them, “How?”.
While you can certainly scale initiatives like managing waste, building circularity in products and managing water, ESG is much more.

ESG is about transformative change at the core of your company’s products and services, how the business runs, how it interacts with customers, technology and suppliers and how the business accounts for the impacts on the environment. However the two constructs of capacity and capability are still very important, albeit in different ways. For ESG related changes to hold sway the organization needs to have the capacity to change and capable leadership to enable it. These can be enabled through experience journeys.

Companies don’t change because top leadership wants it, they change because people believe that the change will make things better. Hence with the end goal in mind organizations need to create customer journeys, employee journeys and supplier journeys for the #ESG #NetZero Shift.

Net Zero cannot be achieved through ‘greening’ the entire energy system at its current output nor by offsetting emissions at their current rate of increase. Absolute emissions must be reduced.

We need to do three things to bring about transformative changes; think in terms of systems, highlight expertise and build trust.

Thinking in systems was largely the responsibility of government or public policy experts. Though now with the entire world in a flux, decision making in business around the simplest of things has become a complex task. Systems thinking helps break things down and at the same time helps look at the many interconnected parts.

At the same time, people are also looking for magical solutions and quick fixes that will solve everything. But, magical solutions mostly only exist on fairy tales. To get better we go to doctors. To fix a car we go to a car mechanic. For help with on a tricky piece of code we go to someone who knows the software. Belief in expertise and trusted advice helps in solving problems, making changes and finding solutions.

Why is this important? Because for anyone to be truly sustainable-a multifaceted, multidimensional, scientific approach is needed and most importantly, we need to trust the experts and the scientists to solve problems.