.... Dawlish community working together to SAVE SANDY LANE recreation and leisure facilities....

Tescopoly - every little hurts!!!

BEWARE!!!!!

Tesco's will soon be doing

consultations in the town. Watch out

for them and remember to say "NO" to

Tescos on Sandy Lane.

See the campaign page for more

www.tescopoly.org

Just a few reasons NOT to have a supermarket on Sandy Lane:

* Being so close to the Town centre it will kill our town shops. DEAD.

* VAST numbers of lorries and deliveries - 24/7

* The cars for 8000 shoppers a day - average

* Pollution - noise, smell, light pollution

* Snarled up roads, more cars, more people - and you thought high season was bad now!

* Delivery problems - how will they get through Starcross?

* Where will our young people go to play? Will they have to be driven to football pitches out of town?

* What about losing the leisure facilities, that view, those fields, where you can walk the dog, have a picnic, or just relax?

Now here's some information from TESCOPOLY. But have a look at their site for more information: www.tescopoly.org

Some of supermarkets' environmental costs include:

Fewer local farmers and shops mean both customers and goods need to be transported further. This means more pollution from cars, as people drive further to shop, and more pollution from aircraft and lorries, as food is transported from around the world. Indeed Tesco's business could be seen as one of the drivers behind the rise in UK CO2 emissions. Tesco transports millions of tonnes of produce around the world, contributing to climate change through transport emissions. A 2005 Friends of the Earth survey found that Tesco came lowest out of the supermarket chains for sourcing British apples.

Tesco's stores are some of the most energy-inefficient buildings in the retail sector. A Sheffield Hallam University study found that despite the new stock, large superstores are the most energy inefficient buildings in the sector. It would take more than 60 corner shops and greengrocers to match the carbon dioxide emissions from one average sized superstore.

Tesco also encourages shoppers to travel by car. One in 10 car journeys in the UK are now to buy food. Work for DEFRA suggests that car use for food shopping results in costs to society of more than £3.5 billion per year from traffic emissions, noise, accidents and congestion. Tesco has been massively expanding into "Extra" format hypermarkets, which are particularly geared towards car-based shopping. The proportion of Tesco's floorspace taken up by hypermarkets is three times what it was 6 years ago.
Tesco is now embarking on selling flights in its stores in Hungary.

Tesco boasts about its progress on reducing waste and how it is following a market trend to introduce degradable plastic bags. But grocery packaging still makes up roughly a quarter of household waste, and the UK's biggest supermarkets distribute some 15 billion plastic bags, which end up in landfill. Even degradable bags are only a very small step, as they will still predominantly go to landfill sites where the lack of sunlight and oxygen will hinder rapid breakdown.
- Read Friends of the Earth's press release from 4th August 2006 on Tesco's initiatives to cut down on plastic bags.
- See the National Federation of Women's Institutes campaign demanding a reduction of excessive food packaging, launched in June 2006
A large amount of food is being wasted. Tesco was among the supermarkets found to be rejecting apples purely on cosmetic grounds by a 2002 Friends of the Earth survey of fruit growers.

The supermarkets' hunt for cheap food has encouraged intensive agriculture, at the expense of more sustainable methods, with devastating effects on the global environment. Tesco says it works with suppliers to keep pesticide residues in fruit and vegetables to a minimum. Yet Government data shows that the company made no overall reduction in the level of pesticide residues in its food between 1998 and 2002. Hormone disrupting pesticides above legal limits have also been found in Tesco fruit and vegetables in 2004 and 2005. As well as posing a threat to human health, pesticide use results in pollution of farmland and water supplies.

Supermarket chains are contributing to deforestation, resulting in loss of biodiversity and linked to social conflict, through reliance on palm oil, a cheap vegetable oil found in over 1,000 Tesco products. For more information, see Friends of the Earth's campaign on palm oil.

Biofuels - Tesco is a major shareholder in and customer of Greenergy Biofuels Limited, a UK company promising customers climate-friendly, sustainable biofuels from UK rapeseed oil. The organisation BiofuelWatch has, however, undertaken research which reveals that Greenergy's biofuels contain increasing amounts of palm oil, soy and sugar cane. All three are crops linked to large-scale rainforest destruction, massive greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and peat and forest fires, and in some instances to human rights abuses. For further information and to take action, please see the BiofuelWatch website.

For further information on supermarkets' environmental impacts, please see the following reports:

Checking out the Environment, Friends of the Earth, June 2005 This briefing looks at the environmental impacts of supermarkets at the local, national and global scale

A Rough Guide to the UK Farming Crisis, Corporate Watch, May 2004 This guide argues that at the root of the farming crisis, are food and agriculture policies and global trade agreements which promote trade liberalisation

How green is your supermarket? Norman Baker MP, March 2004 Mr Baker's comprehensive report sets out recommendations for supermarkets to improve their environmental performance.

Eating Oil: food supply in a changing climate, Sustain, 2001 This report looks at the impacts on fossil fuel use of our dependence on imports for food and the use of resources for producing, processing, packaging and distributing food.