Price Chopper Honored for Sustainability Efforts

Price Chopper was recognized by GXT Green for its siginificant contributions to sustainability efforts and was named to the 2012 GXT Earth Day Honor Roll. In its announcement, GXT cited Price Chopper’s commitment to green building and environmental initiatives, “Price Chopper has shown tremendous leadership in sustainability including LEED Certifications, and an innovative Natural Gas Fuel Cell that provides 60% of the electric energy for its newest Colonie store. They have made a public commitment to a sustainable seafood supply in their chain. They continue to commit to more sustainable stores, products, and packaging for their products, which ensures that they minimize their impact on our environment.” “Price Chopper is committed to reducing energy usage and carbon impacts and investing in sustainable and renewable technologies,” said Bill Sweet, Price Chopper’s vice president of engineering and construction. “Our shoppers will see displays and kiosks throughout the stores that explain what they are looking at and what we have done to conserve utilities and save energy. We hope that some of these green initiatives and the demonstrated results will inspire individuals to change their own behaviors.” GXT Green is a division of Global Exchange Technologies (www.globextec.com), that helps the corporate community understand and mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions through verified, high value and high volume carbon offset projects such as rain forest preservation or reforestation. Price Chopper is actively advancing its Corporate Social Responsibility platform and to that end is pursuing a variety of other environmentally sustainable solutions including: • Recycling more than 75% of construction waste (rather than disposing of it in landfills or incinerators) on all new ground up construction projects. • Designing the use of natural lighting throughout the store to reduce electrical consumption • Utilizing environmentally sustainable building materials throughout the store with a high degree of recycled content • Obtaining (where available) local construction materials to minimize environmental impacts from transportation • Installing state-of-the-art refrigeration equipment to minimize ozone depleting refrigerant charges • Recovering the heat from the refrigeration system and reusing it for space heating and hot water production for use at store level. • Recycling waste produce from trimming through a hydrator process which reduces the produce to “gray water” and eliminates waste from being transported and disposed of at landfills. (at select store locations only) • Utilizing high efficiency, lighting systems throughout the store and in exterior signage Price Chopper has ten registered supermarket projects pending certification by the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Two stores have all ready received Silver Level certification, one store has received Gold Level certification and the retailer’s corporate headquarters in Schenectady, N.Y. is anticipated to receive Gold Level certification.