Waste and recycling

The issue

Over the last few years the need for the UK to reduce it's reliance on landfill has become more critical as existing landfill sites are becoming full and new sites are not being developed. The use of landfill has also been linked to climate change as the gases released from such sites can contribute to climate change if they're not captured / treated.

In addition, the way in which waste is managed has become increasingly complex. New legislation covering areas such as what can be sent to landfill, and how hazardous waste, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and used batteries must be managed, alongside changes to the packaging regulations, for example, all continue to increase both the complexity of environmental compliance and business costs.

What we're doing

For many years Boots has been a leader in the management of waste and recycling activities within the retail sector, and has a sound record in waste minimisation that has placed us in a good position for dealing with new legislative requirements.

We've operated a recycling facility on our Nottingham site for the last 50 years. The current facility receives paper and cardboard, soft mixed plastic, glass bottles, printer toner cartridges and 35 mm film pots from our Nottingham site and many stores.

All our distribution centres recycle cardboard and act as transit points for our shops to send recyclable material back to our Nottingham site for "bulking up" and collection by recycling contractors. Over 22,500 tonnes of materials are collected, sorted and recycled each year.

In our warehouses we recover the transit packaging, cardboard and plastic which we have removed from our suppliers' deliveries.  Bubble wrapping, returned from our stores, is re-used to protect some of our bottled pharmacy medicines sent to stores.

Within our stores we return the plastic merchandising trays used to display our chilled food products back to our food supplier for re-use.

We are working to establish cardboard collections from the stores previously trading as Alliance Pharmacy and continue to liaise with waste contractors as their collection routes expand.

We're continuing to focus on reducing our reliance on landfill, and have set an aspirational target to reduce like-for-like waste to landfill by 20% by the end of March 2013 against a 2007/08 baseline. The charts below show our waste and recycling data for 2007/08.

Total Waste Produced