The Prince's Mayday Network

Empowering customers to reduce carbon emissions

Introduction

Tesco has built its reputation as an innovative retailer by responding to customer requests to reduce and remove key barriers to switching to low-carbon behaviours and shopping habits.

Process

What and How:

Tesco offers a wide range of services, from shopping in stores and via the internet, to personal finance services, to telecoms products including mobile and home phone services. Acting on a company commitment to help customers reduce their impact on the environment, Tesco is engaging customers to determine the key barriers to switching to low-carbon behaviours and shopping habits, and addressing the three key barriers:

The cost of going green
Feeling that their actions made no difference
A lack of reliable advice and information

Lowering the cost of green consumption, Tesco harnessed its experience in using economies of scale to help customers pay less. To show customers that a lot of small behaviour changes can add up to a big difference, Tesco implemented a Green Clubcard Points scheme. Under this scheme, customers are rewarded with points for each carrier bag they save. Most importantly, Tesco then communicates savings back to their customers through various channels to show the aggregated impact.

To help customers make the right choices, Tesco is working with the Carbon Trust and others to develop an accepted and commonly understood measure of the carbon footprint of every product they sell. Tesco has conducted seminars with stakeholders to work through some of the complexities in measuring and minimising a carbon footprint, and have held focus groups with customers that have helped to understand how they read and respond to labels.

Impact

Since halving the price of energy-efficient light bulbs, the Tesco range has trebled and the numbers of customers that now buy these products has risen from 10% last year to over a third

By sharing findings in carbon labelling, Tesco and other companies are learning more about how to most effectively communicate the information gathered to customers