CEO Note: The Methane Clean-Up on Aisle 3
By Glenn Hurowitz, Founder & CEO
Mighty Earth and Changing Markets Foundation have just released a ground-breaking investigation into supermarkets’ methane pollution. “Clean up on Aisle 3: The methane mess supermarkets are hiding” puts this problem into the public eye for the first time.
The report shows these companies have a lot of work to do: Most retailers aren’t even trying to measure their methane emissions. We have previously assessed a wide range of food company emissions and will be calculating retailer emissions in the near future. We know the bulk of their footprint comes from the meat and dairy they sell. If we can do it, the companies themselves certainly can. We have reached out to all of them to offer methodologies and assistance.
The report does contain a bit of good news: some companies are beginning to act on more sustainable protein options. Meat is, quite simply, an enormous driver of climate change – from the deforestation for pastures and feed crops to the methane produced by the animals. Shifting to plant-based and other alternative proteins is the single most important step the food industry can take over the long-term to reduce its footprint on Nature and climate: a 50% shift to plant-based proteins by six leading food retailers alone could save emissions equivalent to removing 25 million cars.
So, it is encouraging that several major retailers including Tesco, Schwartz Group, Carrefour, Sainsbury, and Asda have set targets to increase plant-based protein sales, offered plant-based protein at the same price as meat, and improved their marketing of sustainable protein.
But despite some progress on sustainable proteins, the overall picture is grim. Most retailers scored below 25%, highlighting a major gap between their climate promises and real action. Tesco tops our scorecard with a mediocre score of 51%.
Notably, U.S. retailers are laggards across the board. U.S. supermarkets including Walmart, Costco, and Publix rank among the worst performers in addressing their methane emissions, with scores that reflect minimal transparency and insufficient action. These U.S. retailers will be a growing focus of our campaign.
Without urgent action on methane from retailers we will not be able to effectively slow the pace of rising temperatures. In our engagement with these companies, while they acknowledged that reducing these emissions is critical to tackling climate change and that increasing plant-based offerings could help. But they have so far failed to implement specific, measurable actions to address the problem.
We have a lot more to come from this effort and I hope you will join us in demanding these retailers act to reduce their climate emissions. You can read and share the full report here.
