Coles celebrates third annual Sustainability Week with team members

Coles has launched its third annual Sustainability Week, with activities across the group acknowledging the significant contributions of its 120,000 team members.

While sustainability is a key priority across the business throughout the year, the week is aimed at celebrating achievements and further embedding Coles’ Sustainability Strategy, built around the focus areas of Together to Zero and Better Together, which supports its ambition to be Australia’s most sustainable supermarket.

More than 2,500 stores and sites across the Coles Group will each weekday focus on a key area of the Sustainability Strategy with team member videos, posters and discussions on how to prioritise sustainable ways of working.

Topics covered across the week include:

Food waste

• Celebrating the equivalent of 174 million meals donated to SecondBite through our supermarkets and distribution centres to help Australians doing it tough. Our first choice for unsold, edible food from our supermarkets is to donate to SecondBite.

Recycling

• Maximising opportunities to divert waste from landfill across Coles and celebrating the milestone of more than 2.3 billion pieces of soft plastic returned by customers and collected through REDcycle.

Packaging

• Highlighting achievements in reducing packaging, including that more than 87% of Coles Own Brand packaging can now be recycled.

Coles has:

• started to transition in-store bakery bread tags from non-recyclable polystyrene plastic tags to recyclable cardboard tags (which are also made from 100% recycled materials)
• launched home compostable coffee capsules – a first for a major Australian retailer – as part of the Coles Urban Coffee Culture brand.

Greenhouse gas emissions

• Recognising that not only have we committed to be powered by 100% renewable electricity by June 2025 we already have the agreements in place to meet the commitment.
• Celebrating that in April 2022, Coles became the first major Australian supermarket to launch Own Brand Carbon Neutral Beef. The beef range, now available in Victorian stores with a national rollout planned over the next 12 months, is certified carbon neutral from paddock to shelf to the Australian Government’s Climate Active Carbon Neutral Standard.

“Sustainability continues to grow in importance for our team members, customers, suppliers and shareholders, across a range of areas such as climate change, packaging and waste, animal welfare, and partnerships,” said Thinus Keeve, Chief Sustainability, Property and Export Officer at Coles.

“As part of our ambition to be Australia’s most sustainable supermarket we are continuously looking at ways to support our Sustainability Strategy,” Keeve said.

“This week is about highlighting the many ways we can all work together towards our ambitions, and we recognise that everyone at Coles has a role to play and together we can make a real difference,” he said.

Source: Coles