Convenience Store Chain Establishing a System to Recycle 100% of its Unsold Food

Seven & i Holdings Co., the parent company of the major convenience store chain Seven-Eleven Japan Co., started turning its food waste into animal feed on September 1, 2007, in cooperation with Agri Gaia System Co., a company specializing in food recycling. By the end of July 2007, Seven & i Holdings had already implemented the system of composting food waste from about 1,600 stores, or about 14 percent of all its stores. The company intends to raise this to roughly 2,350, or 20 percent, of its stores by the end of February 2008 (this does not include recycling of oil waste).

The two companies have been working on composting unsold food products collected from approximately 1,000 Seven-Eleven stores in Tokyo's 23 wards since 2003. Seven-Eleven and Ito-Yokado Co., another company of the Seven & i Holdings group, have been selling watermelons and spinach grown using the compost made from the group's waste food products. Under the new system, outdated food products such as packed lunches and delicatessen foods, collected under refrigeration once a day from stores by Seven-Eleven's original waste collecting system, called the "eco distribution system," which was established in 1994, are to be recycled fully by being processed into animal feed.

The waste food products will be sorted at Agri Gaia System's recycling feed mill. Materials suitable for animal feed will be processed, while others will be composted or processed into methane gas to be used as supplementary fuel for the mill. Plastic food trays will be incinerated as an auxiliary fuel. Seven-Eleven intends to sell packed lunches and prepared food containing pork and poultry raised on the feed produced by this new recycling system.

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Posted: 2008/01/14 10:55:57 AM
Japanese version