Corporate Social Responsibility

Our customers tell us that they want a reliable shopping trip. But they also want businesses, including supermarkets, to be good neighbours and to be responsible, fair and honest.

We serve thousands of communities around the world. We are part of these neighbourhoods and always aim to play a positive role in them. In a rapidly changing world being a good neighbour has never been more important. That’s why we’ve developed five new Community Promises to help us to deliver our ambitions.

Every day thousands of Tesco staff work hard to put these Community Promises into action – whether through helping the environment, enabling customers to lead healthier lifestyles, learning and using new skills, supporting local producers or getting involved with local community groups.

Our five promises go to the heart of how we do business, and help us to keep focused on what is important in our communities.

To read this year's report visit: http://cr2010.tescoplc.com/

Actively supporting local communities

A good example here is our Community Champions. The idea is that we ask a person who loves working with the local school, a local charity or local organisation to do just that – help them. That may be helping the local police raise awareness of car seats for children, or collecting for a local charity in the store. This is a simple idea, one that we are introducing around the world. We have already appointed over 270 Champions in Seven Countries.

To learn more visit: http://cr2010.tescoplc.com/communities.aspx

Buying & Selling our Products Responsibly

We have thousands of suppliers around the world. We want those suppliers to be dynamic and innovative – but also to treat their employees fairly, and look after the environment. That means more local sourcing – now accounting for £800m of our annual turnover in the UK alone. It also means checking where everything we buy comes from, and ensuring the suppliers meets our standards. We have now trained over 400 suppliers in Bangladesh, India, China, Spain and the UK in improving labour standards.

To learn more visit: http://cr2010.tescoplc.com/buying-and-selling-our-products-responsibly.aspx

Caring for the environment

We have been working hard to play a positive role, by reducing our direct environmental impact and encouraging suppliers and customers to do the same.

We have now pledged to become a zero carbon business by 2050. To achieve this we have set interim targets of:

• to halve the carbon emissions from all new stores we build worldwide between now and 2020 compared with an equivalent store built in 2006;
• to halve emissions from our existing stores and distribution centres worldwide by 2020; and
• to halve the CO2e created per case of goods delivered worldwide by 2012, compared with 2006.

This year we diverted 100% of our waste in the UK directly away from landfill, we have already carbon labeled 120 products and will continue to label more, so that customers can make environmental choices.

To learn more visit: http://cr2010.tescoplc.com/environmental.aspx

Helping customers make healthy choices

This isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s what our customers want us to do. New healthier ranges; encouraging customers to eat more fruit and vegetables; better nutritional labelling – all these things help people eat healthier diets. We can also take a direct role – by encouraging people to get healthy. Last year we got £6.2 million people active across the group, including aerobics in Thailand, football in China and charity runs in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

To learn more visit: http://cr2010.tescoplc.com/healthy-choices.aspx

Creating good jobs and careers

Tesco’s growth has meant we can give people opportunities to get a job, a steady income and real security for them and their family. That means local jobs, so local communities share in our success. Over the last ten years we have created on average one new job every 20 minutes. Thousands of those jobs have gone to people who had been unemployed for some time, but who can now enjoy the benefits of working for Tesco. For example, in the US, we’ve employed nearly 3,200 people in new, quality jobs. A number of them, such as our Compton and South LA stores, are in areas traditionally under served by modern retailers and where the benefits we bring, such as job creation, make a real difference.

To learn more visit: http://cr2010.tescoplc.com/our-people.aspx