ENERGY AND
CLIMATE CHANGE

We have made a commitment to halve our energy impact by 2020, as well as source all our energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Our approach to managing our energy footprint as well as the impacts of climate change across our business is to ensure that we implement the best innovation available to enable efficiency. From this, we are able to generate energy and financial savings and these gains continue to help us build the business case to increase our energy efficiency. We focus on these three pillars to meet our energy efficiency goals: halving our energy impact (or, energy productivity), understanding our carbon footprint as well as transitioning to more energy efficient technology.

Energy Productivity 100 (EP100)

In 2017, we became the first major retailer to sign up to EP100, The Climate Group’s corporate leadership initiative for energy smart companies doing more with less to lower emissions and accelerate the clean economy. Woolworths set a target to double our energy productivity by 2020 from a 2005 baseline.

Reducing our carbon footprint

Understanding our carbon footprint is vital to enabling our energy and climate change strategy. We do this by calculating the carbon footprint annually and evaluating where within our operations we can implement energy reduction initiatives to ensure that we not only reduce our carbon emissions but are also reducing it in line with science.

Low carbon transition

Our low carbon transition strategy centres around the following key initiatives:

1. Applying an in-house green building protocol to ensure that our facilities have the most up-to-date and energy efficient equipment as possible. Our flagship omni-fulfilment centre in Melbourne, Australia was awarded a 5* rating from the Green Building Council of Australia. Woolworths Palmyra Foodmarket was also the first outlet in South Africa to be awarded a 6-star rating from the Green Building Council South Africa under the retail tenant tool. We currently have five Green-Building-rated facilities across WHL.
2. Working with logistics partners to ensure that our distribution fleet continues to offer us a sustainable solution for the distribution of our products.
3. Working with our suppliers to understand the opportunities within the supply chain for energy efficiency. In Woolworths food, we have launched a green factories assessment to understand energy, water and waste management at our factories.
4. Sourcing renewable energy for our direct operations. We currently have five solar photovoltaic (solar PV) systems across the Group, with four in South Africa – two at the Woolworths Head Office precinct, one at our distribution centre in Montague Gardens in Cape Town and one at our distribution centre in Johannesburg. We also have a solar PV installation at Country Road Group’s Omni-channel Fulfilment Centre in Melbourne, Australia.

We have also made a commitment via the ‘We Mean Business’ call-to-action to set science-based targets for emissions reduction.

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