As well as being UK’s leading grocer, Tesco is Europe’s largest property company with assets of £30 billion. Tesco’s building portfolio is ever changing with numerous new builds, alterations and decommissioning.

Tesco wanted to meet its commitment to new environmental and social performance targets, including the aim to be a zero carbon business by 2050. Waste was increasingly becoming a financial burden – for example, with landfill taxes rising at a rate of £8 per tonne each year until 2014/15.

Anthesis-SecondNature worked with Tesco Property Services [TPS] to develop a new vision and strategy for Tesco stores, namely “100% recyclable stores with zero waste to landfill” and build a new business model delivering financial, social and environmental benefits.

James Dorling, Tesco Director, said:

“In developing a circular model for store recyclability and re-use of fit-out materials, working with our suppliers to eradicate construction waste from landfill, SecondNature helped us save around £1 million per superstore."

Circular Business Model of Tesco Property Services

The business model included the following innovations:

• Implementing a framework for future store construction where all constituent parts are reusable or recyclable
• Introducing a “Reuse Manager” to coordinate and maximize reuse
• Creating a “virtual warehouse” that allows all refurbished materials to be visible to end users, and measures the triple bottom line benefits delivered to the business
• Incentivizing delivery teams to use refurbished material within projects by sharing cost savings
• Designing standards and refurbishment specifications that facilitate reuse
• Redesigning equipment and materials that currently cannot be reused or recycled
• Creating an R&D division within the TPS environmental function to generate and incubate new ideas, innovative technology and increase TPS options to realize further value

Increase efficiency and save money

Tesco is saving around a million with each new superstore as it rolls out its “100%” strategy across the company's estate. Zero construction store waste is going to landfill, and waste (where possible) is used to make alternative sources of energy. New stores built from now until 2020 will emit half the carbon emissions of a new store in 2006.

In a follow-on project, Anthesis-SecondNature worked with Tesco to trial adding doors to fridges. These are now being rolled out in all new stores, which is expected to save Tesco around £12 million per year. Retrofitting doors across the entire estate should deliver an additional £15-20 million savings per year.