Asdas 10m is a hill of beans for customers but a game-changing sum for sustainability

This equated to 50p, or a hillock of own-label beans, for each customer who visited an Asda store in the week before Christmas.

Placing the figure into a Wal-Mart perspective would have been even more fun, had it not caused the calculator on my laptop to go into meltdown when I tried to calculate £10m as a percentage of Wal-Mart’s annual sales of $354bn. Needless to say, it’s very, very small.

This is not a condemnation of Asda. Indeed, Asda’s packaging team should be credited for its efforts to address the problems with the UK’s waste collection and recycling systems.

However, it would be good to see this recognised at a more senior level. Asda spent almost £51m last year on advertising in the UK, excluding online. Imagine the air-time £10m could buy for a campaign on recycling and the impact this could have on public life, not to mention the benefits it could bring to an industry that does so much to enable Asda to thrive.

Before I receive letters saying ‘don’t be stupid, Asda isn’t a charity and it has better things to do than spend its money on promoting the greater good’, it’s worth pointing out that it wouldn’t be alone in adopting such a strategy.

Tesco last year pledged £25m in funding for a Sustainable Consumption Institute, and, if there’s one thing that can provoke action from retailers in the current climate, it’s the threat of being out-greened by a rival.