Tesco

A SUPERMARKET chain’s eco credentials have been slammed after staff were spotted chucking hundreds of stale loaves of bread into a skip.

To send a link to this page to a friend, simply enter their email address below.

The message will include the name and email address you gave us when you signed up.

Email address

  Send link

To send a link to this page to a friend, you must be logged in.

Eagle-eyed Tom McCarthy was passing the Tesco supermarket, in Colney Hatch Lane, Muswell Hill, when he saw workers wheeling out eight six-foot long trolleys round the back of the shop and piling the bread into a skip, on Friday, December 10.

Mr McCarthy, a shopper from Southgate, said: “It’s an absolute disgrace. At times like this, when people all over the place are hungry and starving, it is terrible that such a huge quantity is being chucked into a skip. It seemed to me an absolute outrage.”

He claimed there must have been about 400 loaves being dumped in the skip and feared it could be a regular practice at the supermarket, putting its green policy in doubt.

Ironically, Tesco urges shoppers on its Greener Living website to “chop your food waste” by cutting down on the amount of unused food, like bread, that gets thrown into landfill sites.

The website reads: “Throwing away food wastes money – an estimated £420 every year or £8 a week for the average family. It also damages the environment as, on top of the resources required to make it, food releases greenhouse gases when it is sent to landfill sites.”

Gillian Livingstone, of environmental group Transition Crouch End, said Tesco would do well to follow the example of supermarkets who donate waste food to community cafes, such as the Station House Community Cafe in Finsbury Park, run by Foodcycle.

She said: “Tesco makes a profit despite the kind of food waste observed at the Muswell Hill outlet. With the level of waste peaking during the Christmas period, we can imagine this is just one instance of many.”

A Tesco spokesman said it never sends any of its unused food to landfills, instead sending it to combined heat and power plants to be burned and turned into usable energy.

He said: “We have a very proficient ordering system with very little food waste, but we were in a strange period just before Christmas with severe weather across the country and predicting store ordering was very difficult.”

He added that the company does not give out stale food to customers and unwanted food is handed out to environmental schemes from its head office depots.