SUSTAINABILITY IN BUSINESS
Coles team member Xavier uses an anaerobic digester being trialled at its Southland Store in Melbourne.
Scaling up COLES TELLS WASTE MANAGEMENT REVIEW ABOUT THE SUPERMARKET’S INITIATIVES TO TACKLE FOOD WASTE, INTRODUCE RECYCLABLE PACKAGING AND DIVERT WASTE FROM LANDFILL.
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he commercial and industrial (C&I) sector generated around 20.4 million tonnes of waste in 2018. Within this landscape, the large supermarkets are taking great strides to reduce their own back-of-house general waste, divert food waste from landfill and embed more sustainable practises into their own products. Coles is one organisation with the scale to make a difference. The morethan-100-year old supermarket chain serves millions of customers through more than 820 retail outlets around the country. Through investment in experienced sustainability strategists, the company has mobilised its stakeholders to work towards several ambitious targets.
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Vikas Ahuja was approached by Coles five years ago to take on the role of Head of Energy and Sustainability at Coles head office in Melbourne. An engineer by trade, Vikas has worked in various areas, including in government policy around renewables and running his own sustainable consulting business within an infrastructure engineering company. Having analysed the onset of climate change from a variety of lenses, including policy and finance, Vikas is now tackling it from a retail perspective. “As a national retailer, our commitment is to respond to what our customers are asking
for. The feedback we get is that food waste and packaging are the two most significant issues for sustainability,” Vikas explains. In 2018, Coles set a target to divert 90 per cent of its waste from landfill by 2022. It also set a task to halve its food waste from Coles supermarkets by 2020 and recently announced it had hit this milestone one year earlier than planned. The targets form part of Coles’ food waste and packaging strategy, which sets out commitments that include donating unsold edible food from every Coles supermarket, ensuring all Coles brand packaging is recyclable by 2020 and working with suppliers to reduce food waste. Vikas says that in 2018, Coles
