With 68,000 employees and 800,000 trading members, the UK's Co-operative Group is one of the largest consumer co-operatives in the world, operating food retail, insurance, banking, funeral, pharmacy, travel and farming businesses. The Group is also one of the largest purchasers of green electricity in the world. Here, the Group's Environment Manager, Chris Shearlock shares his expertise on what makes the Co-operative an energy efficiency trailblazer.

What are your proudest "green" achievements?

"We purchase 98% of our electricity from renewables - wind, hydro and biomass - across 4000 buildings in the UK. That's over 740 gigawatt hours per year. We've been building up to this over the last few years.

"We use microrenewables at our head office buildings, for example we have the UK's largest vertical array of photo-voltaic solar panels at the CIS Tower, in Manchester."

What's the most challenging aspect of your job?

"Any large company has got a lot of pressing issues at a time. Climate change and energy are only starting to become one of the top issues. It's hard work getting the attention of the decision makers."

How do you encourage customers to become more environmentally conscious?

"We're trying to offer more services. We've done a lot of work on carbon offsets. We became the first retailer last year to offer C02 offsetting on car insurance [The Co-operative's Eco-Motor Insurance] and mortgages. We're trying to offer people an option they didn't have before."

What are the Co-operative Group's next major environmental goals?

"We've set ourselves the target of energy reduction of 25% by 2012. And we have the target of generating 15% of our electricity from our own renewables. We have completed our first wind farm on our existing farm site and [the development of] another wind farm is awaiting a decision.

"We're trying to look at editing out the worst things from our product range. We're not going to sell white goods unless they reach 'A' level [the most efficient according to the EU Energy Label scheme] and we're banning incandescent light bulbs from this Autumn in a pilot at 50 stores."

What advice would you give to someone starting out in your position?

"Start to measure what your impacts [on the environment] are. If you're starting afresh, you'll probably find not much has been recorded. You've got to start recording and establishing targets for [carbon] reduction. They're the obvious things. Rather than getting hung up on complicated management systems, look at themes, like biodiversity and waste; and get buy-in from your management."

What major changes have you noticed in the area of energy reduction?

"In food retail, the environment is a big issue because we're all trying to compete around it; that wasn't the case 18 months ago, even a year ago."

What's the most important emerging technology for sustainability in your sector and what challenges does it pose?

"Small scale renewables - microrenewables. More and more people want to try using them but the economics is challenging, because the payback period is long; over 25 years. We're typically working on a four-year payback period. If we can get the economics to work, it'll become more widespread."

Best Practice Ideas

Please visit the Forum here and share a tip that you have for organisations to reduce their carbon emissions. Often the very simplest ideas can have the greatest effect in reducing carbon emissions:

• Make better use of natural light.
• Use a variety of techniques to raise environmental awareness.

(Nick Hillard, Environment Officer, University of Warwick)

• Rather than getting hung up on complicated management systems, look at themes, like biodiversity and waste; and get buy-in, from your management.
  (Chris Shearlock, Environment Manager, The Co-operative Group)

• Get the finance team on board - let them see that all [proposed] measures make ecological sense and financial sense.
  (David Sutchfield, Energy Officer, University of St. Andrews)