Supermarket to switch to 'green' fridges
All Sainsbury stores to be in line by 2030
Supermarket Sainsbury's will underline its green credentials with a crackdown on environmentally damaging refrigerators.
Chief executive officer Justin King told an environment agency conference that it planned to switch to carbon-dioxide fridges in all its stores by 2030.
CO2 fridges are far less harmful to the environment than the hydrofluorocarbon units in general use. Sainsbury's - the UK's third biggest supermarket - plans to convert the first 135 of its 800 stores by 2014. The supermarket says switching to CO2 fridges would slash the carbon footprint from its current store base by around a third.
Mr King said: "Fridges are by far and away the biggest source of CO2 emissions in any supermarket through both the energy required to power them and the refrigerants themselves.
"If all supermarkets in the UK switched to this sort of refrigeration, the reduction in CO2 emissions would amount to around two million tonnes a year."
From next year all new stores opened by Sainsbury's will use CO2 fridges as standard, Mr King said. But he added that a lack of skilled engineers to build and maintain the units was a "serious barrier" to a broader improvement.
Mr King said: "Government needs to seize the opportunity here by helping people retrain to work in the rapidly expanding green sector.
"We'd like to be in a place where we can use more home-grown expertise to reduce UK carbon emissions in line with future targets, instead of looking to other countries for knowledge and innovation."