Russel Norman

Aussie retailers need to face up to climate change

Published: November 9, 2006

by Russel Norman

Australian Public Broadcaster, ABC released a survey this week of Australia’s ten largest companies to find out what they knew and what they were doing about their own carbon emissions. Most of those ten companies also own major companies here in Aotearoa, so the results of the survey are of some consequence to our own situation. Worryingly, the retail multinational, Woolworths (which owns Woolworths here as well as Countdown and Foodtown) and Westfield (which operates a number of malls here in New Zealand) had no idea of what their own carbon emissions were. And, so not surprisingly, neither has a strategy in place to tackle the problem.

Retailers have an incredibly important role to play in ameliorating and preventing climate change. Their purchasing power dictates the behaviour for a lot of other companies that produce and manufacture goods. The food miles debate got some bad press last week with the poor old New Zealand kiwifruit being somewhat slighted over in Europe, and the Greens had to come to the defence of NZ dairy and lamb, which actually have greenhouse advantages over European produced dairy and lamb. Food miles is a useful concept but it’s not the whole story as we also need to consider whether the food was airfreighted or shipped, and the greenhouse emissions released in production and storage. But in general we cannot afford to be importing huge amounts of food that we can equally effectively be producing here in New Zealand. Locally produced seasonal fruit and veges come out on the upside environmentally.

I’d love to see Woolworths and Westfield adopt a vision of minimising their greenhouse emissions, supporting local producers, as well as working with their local city councils to integrate more effectively with public transport in the area and dramatically shrink the huge carparks attached to their complexes. Woolworths and Westfield could aim in a relatively short space of time to have customers leaving their stores more regularly to hop on a bus or train with a handful of (reuseable) bags full of local produce, rather than to drive off with a bootful of imported food and products that used to be made by New Zealand workers. And they could reduce their energy use by turning off lights and cleaning aircon filters more regularly – Richmond Mall near Nelson made huge savings in the their electricity bills by taking a few of these simple steps.

Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare | Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Thu, November 9th, 2006   

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