Our goal is to manage waste from our stores and warehouses more efficiently over time and send increasingly less to landfills. We are doing this by implementing best practices from inside our family of stores and in the wider industry to provide our frontline teams with the tools, guidance and support needed to divert as much waste as possible from landfills.
Since 2008, our IGA stores have partnered with Earth Day Canada on multiple initiatives that reduce our environmental impact in the province of Quebec.
Earth Day Canada created The Action Reduction Program, a certification program adapted for supermarkets, to recognize their environmental sustainability efforts, enable them to set concrete goals and communicate their waste reduction commitments to customers. The program’s certification consists of six levels, beginning with the collection of cardboard and plastic film from stores all the way to the highest level of certification, which requires stores to use all available waste diversion streams to achieve an overall diversion rate of 80% or more.
As of April 2020, over 70% of our IGA stores have been certified to one of the six levels, including more than 10% of stores at the highest level. We congratulate our IGA stores for their exceptional efforts! We aim to expand this program to our other banners over the coming years.
We are always exploring new, innovative technologies and programs we can bring to life to improve our environmental performance. To this end, we launched a pilot project to recover expanded polystyrene from select IGA stores in 2015. Since then, participating stores have been able to divert… Read More Styrofoam scraps such as coolers used to transport fish and meat trays that had to be unpacked because they were not sold or donated on time. The packaging is rinsed and dried before being accumulated on pallets or in large transparent bags. They are then picked up by our trucks and transported to the Terrebonne warehouse on Montreal’s North Shore.
The Styrofoam is currently recycled by Groupe Gagnon, a family business that aims to revolutionize the recycling industry. The transformed material is intended for a collection of outdoor furniture containing up to 80% polystyrene and recycled glass, and it can be used in the manufacture of a concrete additive specially designed to increase the strength of concrete. Read Less
To make product storage for shipping as sustainable as possible, we ship our products throughout the country on reusable Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool (CHEP) pallets that we rent in a “share and reuse” system. CHEP pallets are easily identified with their distinct blue colour and do not end up in landfills. They are reused to ship products and take goods between our stores and warehouses.
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