Asda has become the world's first supermarket to trial a vast "cave" storage system deep in the mountains of the Italian Alps for its golden delicious apples, in a ground-breaking move designed to reduce its carbon footprint.

The initiative from Asda, in partnership with the Italian apple supplier Melinda, offers the capacity to store up to 50,000 tonnes of apples, saving 60% of the electricity needed to store the same quantity in a standard refrigerated warehouse.

As well as the electricity savings, the project will also lead to decreased water consumption (equivalent to 10 Olympic swimming pools), a saving of land equivalent to 10 football fields, and decreased CO2 emissions (the equivalent of a 50-hectare wood of adult conifers, the size of London's Green Park and St James's Park added together).

The cave space in Val di Non, in the Trentino region of northern Italy, was created after a local building company extracted rock from the mountain for building purposes. This rock was used to restore part of the St Peter colonnade of the Vatican in Rome.