league table

It’s only been a few days since our tuna league table exposed John West’s broken promise to only source sustainable tuna, but it’s been making waves everywhere.  We’ve had celebrities like Gillian Anderson coming out in support of the campaign, and were even invited on This Morning with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to talk about how John West’s customers have been duped.

The new Greenpeace tinned tuna league table exposes the wide gulf between UK supermarkets and brands which have taken sustainability seriously and those which have simply broken promises to clean up. Use this to help you decide which brands to buy and which to avoid until they improve. 

#JustTuna

For the first time, this league table ranks brands on a wider range of issues. Yes, there’s fishing methods of course, but we’ve also rated them on;

I’m so happy to announce that after we released our 2014 tuna league table, and after all your emails, tweets and calls to Tesco over the last few weeks – we have a fantastic victory. The manufacturer of Oriental & Pacific tuna has agreed to our demands. This means that fewer sharks, turtles and rays will be killed as a result of the method used to fish this tuna.

The results are in!

Which tinned tuna brands win, and which ones are fit for the bin? This tinned tuna league table reveals exactly how the tins stack up.

It’s nearly Christmas …. And as I write this it's even snowing outside the Greenpeace office, so maybe it’s time for a little goodwill and some good news.

Way back in 2008 we published a league table ranking the major tinned tuna suppliers in the UK on a number of environmental criteria. Back then big brands John West and Princes were languishing at the bottom of the pile. When we updated that league table in June 2009, we reported some significant process from many of the UK's big retailers – with Sainsbury’s, Co-op, M&S, Waitrose and Asda all increasing their commitments to more responsible sourcing of the tuna in their cans.

Purse seined tuna

Tinned tuna is big business - there's a can in almost everyone's cupboard. Here in the UK we can't get enough of it - we're the second biggest consumer in the world after the USA. Globally tuna exports are worth more than any other fish species, at around 2.7 billion dollars per year.

But there are big problems with the way tuna is caught. Our new briefing paper, Tinned Tuna's Hidden Catch, explains how large numbers of sea turtles, sharks and other fish are all being wiped out by the global tuna industry. And tuna is in trouble itself, with some species critically endangered by overfishing.

Purse seined tuna