Sainsbury’s wins with two-sided receipts at environmental awards

Sainsbury’s picked up a prestigious environmental award for the green impact of its work with two-side thermal receipts from supplier, NCR.

The supermarket giant was awarded the Product Premier Award at 2009 Business Commitment to the Environment (BCE) Environmental Leadership Awards at a ceremony in London this week.

It won the recognition after successfully reducing its use of paper by almost half or 186 tonnes of paper a year with the installation of new till receipt printers at up to 9,500 checkouts across the UK.

The retailer was the first in Europe to roll out NCR’s two-sided thermal (2ST) printing technology in June 2007 and produce till receipts that can be printed on both sides.

Dennis Fuller, Sainsbury’s Head of Store IT installations said: ‘The BCE Environmental Leadership Award recognises the efforts that Sainsbury’s and NCR have put into improving the environmental performance of our tills.

“This includes NCR’s innovative, receipt printers, which print on both sides of the paper simultaneously. This technology not only provides environmental benefits, but also provides customers with shorter, more manageable receipts, faster print times and fewer stoppages for receipt roll changes.”

The work has resulted in it using 502,000 fewer till rolls, where the NCR devices use 35 to 50 percent less energy than other till printers.

The BCE particularly recognised the fact that the switch will also reduce Sainsbury’s annual carbon dioxide emissions by 284 tonnes a year.

The reduction in its carbon footprint comes not just from the reduction in paper usage, but also savings in transport and energy from using less paper and power. For example, the supplier estimated that using fewer till rolls will save 76,691 litres of diesel and reduce wastewater production by 12 million litres.

Praising all of this year’s winners, BCE President, Sir Anthony Cleaver, commented: “Never in BCE’s 35-year history has UK business faced greater economic challenges. This year’s BCE Award winners must surely be congratulated. They should be very proud of their outstanding achievements and held up as shining examples of how improved environmental performance can deliver significant business benefits.”

Other winners of this year’s other Premier Awards were: Pfizer, River Dart Country Park and Toyota Manufacturing UK. And Richard Lambert, Director-General of the CBI, said it had just published its second climate change tracker, which monitors the progress of government and business towards meeting the BCE’s environmental goals.

“It shows that much needs to be done to get us back on track, not least by business. Today’s winners are true low-carbon leaders,” Lambert said. “They have made great strides in curbing their emissions and developing some remarkable low-carbon products and services. It will be their commitment and innovation that will get us on the road to a low-carbon economy.”