Sainsbury's has signed a three-year contract with waste management firm Biffa to send food waste from 40 of its Midlands stores to the Birmingham-based firm's anaerobic digestion facility in Leicestershire.

The deal will see food waste from 40 Sainsbury's stores in the Midlands treated at Biffa's Wanlip AD plant

Supermarket giant Sainsbury's has singled out anaerobic digestion (AD) as its preferred method of organic waste treatment and intends to treat all its food waste using AD by 2012.

Material collected under the agreement will be sent to Biffa's 1.5MW Wanlip AD facility in Leicestershire, where it will be broken down to create biogas and used to generate electricity for the National Grid.

Since October 2005, Biffa has worked with Sainsbury's to provide recycling and waste management services to around 600 stores. Under this agreement, Biffa has also overseen a waste oil recycling scheme, management of confidential paperwork and back-of-store residual waste collection, treatment and disposal.

"Securing this contract with Sainsbury's for the management of food waste from their Midlands stores has been the culmination of 18 months' hard work to optimise the performance of the Wanlip AD plant and then to secure the necessary authorisations to receive food waste direct" said Biffa's engineering director, John Casey.

Biffa is currently increasing its foothold in the energy generation market and, in addition to increasing the capacity of the Wanlip facility, has also begun construction on a second AD facility in Cannock, Staffordshire. Biffa hopes to have the 80,000 tonnes-a-year capacity plant operational by autumn 2010 (see letsrecycle.com story).

Sainsbury's

Commenting on the arrangement with Biffa, Neil Sachdev, Sainsbury's commercial director, said: "We are the industry leader in the use of anaerobic digestion and with this additional capacity provided by Biffa, we put ourselves even further ahead."

"Respect for the environment is one of our key values, and as such, we will completely stop sending food waste to landfill within the next few weeks. We are desperate for greater anaerobic digestion capacity and would therefore like to see greater, clearer incentives for investment in this green technology."

In January 2009, Sainsbury's signed a "long-term" contract with PDM Group to handle its food waste in a move which was set to see the food waste recycling firm process material from all of Sainsbury's 283 UK stores by the end of summer 2009 (see letsrecycle.com story).

The company explained that the deal with Biffa did not infringe on its existing arrangements with PDM, as Sainsbury's was simply committed to using AD wherever was geographically practical.

A spokesman told letsrecycle.com: "PDM do food waste recycling for us via the process of fluid bed combustion. AD is our preferred method of disposal, so in areas where AD is available and within a practical distance of a depot, we will use that."