Asda opens £27m green store

Retail giant Asda has opened an energy efficient store in Bootle, Merseyside, which has diverted 95% of its operational waste from going to landfill. The new store is part of Asdas efforts to achieve sending zero waste to landfill by 2010, meaning everything disposed by Asda will be recycled, re-used or composted.

The £27 million store has been constructed from timber rather than steel and has been built using reclaimed brick sourced from Liverpools docks two miles from the stores location. The shop will be heated by a biomass boiler run on wood chips, the roof is made from recycled aluminium foil and the kerbs in the stores car park are made from recycled plastic bags.

An Asda spokesman said: Our approach is to go green and to be commercially driven as well as being environmentally driven. But the aim is to go green in an affordable way, to reduce our waste and lower our energy consumption at the lowest cost to our business.

Cardboard and plastic from the store goes to Asdas sorting centre in Skelmersdale, Lancashire, which are then baled and sent on to reprocessors for recycling.

Asda is currently recycling 65% of waste from its UK stores but aims to recycle the other 35%, which is mostly organic waste.

An Asda spokesman said: The biggest chunk of our waste we do not recycle is organic matter and we are looking to assess how we can deal with food waste that is past its sell-by-date or damaged. We are looking to use anaerobic digestion technology to deal with this. In our Bootle store, we are working with waste companies to deal with our food waste.

Retail director Andy Clarke said: As a central project in our sustainable construction programme, Bootle is our test bed for all future innovation. We will take our experiences from Bootle and incorporate the best and most effective components into all future stores.

By reducing our energy emissions, we are able to reduce our operational cost, which ultimately means lower prices for customers.