Marks & Spencer Gets Greener
by Bonnie Alter, London 
on 01.15.07
Marks & Spencer, already on the A list for its environmentally aware practices, has announced its “A Plan” to get even better. They will spend £200M ($393M) over the next five years to implement their 100-point plan which includes making the supermarket carbon neutral and sending no waste to landfills by 2012. Already at the forefront, last year the top executives saw the film “An Inconvenient Truth” and Stuart Rose, the Chief Executive said “We believe a responsible business can be a profitable business. We are calling this "Plan A" because there is no 'plan B'.” The plan covers five areas, including fair trade --offering more Fairtrade products and making 20M garments a year out of Fairtrade cotton (an extension of their existing commitment). They will reduce their use of packaging by 25% and use packaging materials from sustainable or recycled sources. Already cut back, it will now become fully degradable, using cornstarch derived plastic. Stores will also test composters which will produce biogas from out of date food and other waste. The retailer will buy as much food from the UK and Ireland as possible; doubling the amount with the next twelve months. Interestingly, they will decrease the amount of food flown in and label imported food as 'flown'. And as a final show of solidarity, Stuart Rose will swap his company BMW for a hydrogen powered car. :: Marks & Spencer
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Good effort from Marks & Sparks - they seem to be implementing most of the up to date techniques you guys have been talking about recently. They are also talking about only using offsetting 'as a last resort', which is an encouraging principle.
A commendable initiative, leading from the front. Did you know that we have just one remaining grower and one remaining processor of onions for pickling in the UK and that most of the UK retail packs are filled with onions from Poland, some even packed there. 1,000 unnecessary extra travel miles for no good reason.
Admirable words from Marks and Spencer, but if you read the plans, they are largely about recycling. There is no commitment to reduce packaging. If you visit M&S today you will still see ridiculous examples of over-packaging. Recycling is all well and good, but reducing the amount of packaging in the first place would be far preferable.
TotallyWasted.org
Again "Totally Wasted" shows complete ignorance in their research and don't even read the article on the page in which they are commenting
Obviously a commitment to absolutely reduce packaging (not just packaging growth) by 25%, as stated above IS a commitment to reduce packaging.
it is people like the person behind the "totally Wasted" website who are going to rile against the supermarkets no mater what they do.
Thank you for starting to charge for carrier bags from May. I always have my own shopping bag and on occasions need extra I keep one of your handy fold up shoppers with me that I bought as soon as they came out and it is still going strong I am willing to pay for any extra carriers We had to in the sixties I prefered the brown paper ones and would love to see those back in all shops
Adding on to what totally wasted said, re a commitment to reducing packaging, WHY has it taken them so long to make such a commitment? Agreed, its never too late, but why wait to be inspired by movies like, 'Inconvenient truth'?? Why not just do it now, instead of making promises to do so in a certain timeframe? Why does it take a bigger organisation longer to implement change, as opposed to smaller ones who
walk their talk', right away.