Massy Stores is re­port­ing that it has man­aged to cut down its card­board waste at all store lo­ca­tions by some 90,000 pounds, thanks to its part­ner­ship with New Age Re­cy­cling Ltd on a ma­jor waste re­duc­tion ini­tia­tive.

An of­fi­cial re­lease is­sued by Massy Stores, CEO Rox­ane de Fre­itas ex­plained they made the re­cy­cling achieve­ment dur­ing the pe­ri­od June 2021 to De­cem­ber 2021, thanks to their part­ner­ship with New Age Re­cy­cling.

Rox­anne de Fre­itas al­so re­port­ed on their achieve­ments with re­duc­ing Massy’s waste plas­tic.

“We start­ed a jour­ney, aligned to Massy’s pur­pose of cre­at­ing val­ue and trans­form­ing lives, to re­duce the dis­tri­b­u­tion of waste plas­tic in the en­vi­ron­ment by en­cour­ag­ing cus­tomers to use reusable bags.  The re­sult has been a 70-80% re­duc­tion in cus­tomer con­sump­tion of plas­tic bags at Massy Stores when com­pared to our con­sump­tion lev­els in pri­or years,” she not­ed.

“Sim­i­lar­ly, we re­ceive large quan­ti­ties of waste card­board and card­board pack­ag­ing in our back store.  We are en­cour­aged that through this part­ner­ship with New Age Re­cy­cling, those ma­te­ri­als can be reused and re­pur­posed in­stead of adding to land­fill waste,” the Massy Stores CEO stat­ed.

New Age Re­cy­cling Lim­it­ed is a sub­sidiary of HAD­CO Group, and is fo­cused on col­lect­ing, sort­ing, and bal­ing wastepa­per, card­board and Tetra Pak; and col­lect­ing and sort­ing used alu­mini­um cans and PET bot­tles for the pur­pose of re­cy­cling.

Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor, Kevin White­man, chal­lenged the pub­lic to be part of the re­cy­cling move­ment.

“Con­sumers need to call on com­pa­nies to take ac­tion to build re­cy­cling in­to their busi­ness mod­el, and com­pa­nies should em­brace and em­bark on the be­hav­iour­al change need­ed; and work to­wards cre­at­ing a cir­cu­lar econ­o­my and re­duc­ing land­fill waste,” Kevin White­man stat­ed.

He added: “This has clear­ly been the vi­sion of Massy Stores as it con­tin­ues to demon­strate its com­mit­ment to cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty. We are ex­cit­ed to al­so part­ner on this jour­ney to re­duce our lo­cal green­house gas emis­sions”.

Ac­cord­ing to the Massy Sto­ries re­lease, in ad­di­tion to the above-men­tioned waste re­duc­tion ini­tia­tives, the su­per­mar­ket chain al­so has un­der­tak­en sev­er­al oth­er sus­tain­abil­i­ty ini­tia­tives in­clud­ing:

■   Con­tin­ued sup­port of the iCare pro­gramme at ma­jor store lo­ca­tions across the coun­try.

■   In­cor­po­rat­ed in­su­lat­ed roof­ing de­signs and LED light­ing, both of which are more en­er­gy ef­fi­cient, at our new and re­fur­bished stores, in Trinidad and To­ba­go and across the re­gion.

■   Switched to R-404A gas - a gas with ze­ro ozone lay­er im­pact, used in new re­frig­er­a­tion equip­ment

■   Us­age of en­er­gy ef­fi­cient LED light­ing in new and re­fur­bished lo­ca­tions.

■   In­stalled en­er­gy ef­fi­cient UV Ger­mi­ci­dal lamp sys­tems at all store lo­ca­tions – which form a part of the Cen­tral Air Con­di­tion sys­tems and san­i­tize the air cir­cu­lat­ed by the AC sys­tem, treat­ing it for mould, bac­te­ria and germs.