Marks & Spencer’s the world’s most sustainable retailer by 2015?

March 4, 2010 by timbercommunity

Read more about Marks & Spencer  long term eco and ethical plan. The plan A describes how the company plan to ensure that key raw materials come from the most sustainable source possible and make the company carbon neutral.

 
Summary of new commitments 
Background
Marks & Spencer launched its eco and ethical plan, Plan A, in January 2007 with the overall goals of making M&S carbon neutral; sending no waste from our operations to landfill; extending sustainable sourcing; being a fair partner and setting new standards in ethical trading and helping customers and employees live a healthier lifestyle. While these objectives remain the same, we are now extending Plan A further by encouraging all of our customers and employees to live ‘greener lifestyles’ and embedding sustainability into the way we do business. The original 100 Plan A commitments have been extended to 180 and the new targets have deadlines of 2015 and beyond. 
The new commitments are divided into the seven areas below and include: 
1. Customers and Plan A 
Goal: to help our customers to live more sustainable lives 
Encouraging 21 million M&S customers to live a more sustainable lifestyle starting today with the launch of a new competition - Your Green Idea – for customers to submit their ideas for ‘green’ actions for M&S to adopt. The winning idea will receive £100,000 to be spent on ‘greening’ an organisation such as a school, charity or small business;
Converting all 2.7 billion individual M&S food, clothing and home items (across 36,000 product lines) sold every year into ‘Plan A products’, so that each carries at least one sustainable or ethical attribute (e.g. carrying Fairtrade or Marine Stewardship Council certification or using free range or other sustainable ingredients). We will aim to convert 50% of our products by 2015 and 100% by 2020;
We are offering our customers a home energy service to help save our customers hundreds of pounds a year and reduce their carbon footprint. This will include a home insulation service, bespoke energy advice, renewable energy installations (e.g. solar panels) and energy efficient heating solutions. 
2. Make Plan A part of how we do business 
Goal: to accelerate our moves to make Plan A ‘how we do business’ 
We will launch a five-year Plan A incubator fund with £50m to resource R&D activities and support the early stages of development of new Plan A products and services for our customers;
Our employees are key to making Plan A how we do business and we will involve all of them in Plan A. We will offer to insulate, free of charge, the homes of all of M&S employees and give them a home energy monitor. We will also give them a greater role in community activities by giving them one paid day off a year to do voluntary work where they live;
We will become the first retailer to introduce an internal price of carbon to encourage our people to reduce the amount of CO2 we generate as a business;
We will make successful delivery of Plan A part of the bonus plan for our management board;
We will build Plan A into all aspects of our construction programme and, building on the success of our initial three eco stores, develop a number of ‘learning stores’ over the next five years to improve our understanding of sustainable construction.
3. Tackling climate change 
Goal: make our operations in UK and Republic of Ireland carbon neutral. 
We will become the first major retailer to ensure that six key raw materials we use - palm oil, soy, cocoa, beef, leather, coffee - come from sustainable sources that do not contribute to deforestation, one of the biggest causes of climate change;
We will select six food product categories, analyse every aspect of how they contribute to climate change and identify the steps needed to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint;
We will also convert our top 100 clothing factories into Plan A factories which adopt best practice environmental standards by installing more efficient lighting, improving insulation and temperature controls to reduce their energy use by at least 10%;
We will reduce our own operational carbon emissions by 35% including via cutting the carbon emissions of our refrigeration by 50% by 2015. 
4. Packaging and waste 
Goal: stop sending waste to landfill from our stores, offices and warehouses, reduce our use of packaging and carrier bags, and find new ways to recycle and reuse the materials we use. 
We will work with partners such as local authorities and RecycleBank to provide our customers with better and more consistent recycling services. We have recently announced an agreement with Somerset Waste Partnership - the first of four partnerships with local authorities to pioneer a new approach to closed loop recycling and ensure we have more recycled product in our food packaging;
We will develop with our suppliers a M&S sustainable forest programme with the aim of sourcing all of our cardboard packaging from there. We will work with the forest’s owners to deploy ‘gold standard’ forestry management practices, including going beyond replanting and investing in the area’s biodiversity;
We will increase the number of clothing garments our customers recycle every year from two million to 20 million, including via our partnership with Oxfam, significantly reducing the tonnage of clothing sent to landfill;
We will launch a range of age neutral packaging by working with Help the Aged to ensure our food packaging can be used conveniently by our customers. 
5. Being a fair partner 
Goal: improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in our supply chain and our local communities. 
We will work with our suppliers and partners to enable them to provide training and education to 500,000 workers in our supply chain, to help improve their livelihoods. The areas we will cover include basic healthcare, workers’ rights and, where possible, literacy and numeracy following the successful trial of projects in Morocco, Indonesia and Bangladesh;
Becoming the first major retailer to actively tackle and bring clarity to the living wage debate. M&S will do this by determining and agreeing a fair, living wage before implementing a process to ensure our clothing suppliers pay this wage to their workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. Based on our successful pilot in Bangladesh, we will do this by working with our suppliers to improve productivity and management practices;
We will roll out our learnings from our ethical model factories to all our clothing factories we use in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. This follows a successful trial in three factories in Bangladesh where we have shown we have been able to find a sustainable solution to raising workers’ salaries, while also improving productivity and efficiency.
We will enable our top 100 Food factories to become Plan A factories which adopt best practice ethical and environmental standards. All food factories will have strengthened HR practices, use people performance indicators, staff surveys, invest in staff training and mature industrial relations to create better places to work, so that by 2015, 25% of M&S food will be produced by factories with HR best practices . From an environmental perspective all food factories will be measuring and adopting good practice in terms of water, waste and energy management so that, by 2015, 25% M&S food will come from factories with zero waste to landfill and demonstrating 20% reduction on energy usage. 
6. Natural resources 
Goal: to ensure that our key raw materials come from the most sustainable source possible, in order to protect the environment and the world’s natural resources. 
Building on our existing advanced traceability in food, we will become the first major retailer to ensure the traceability of all the key raw materials we use in our clothing and home products, from source to store. This includes commodities such as cotton, wool, polyester, nylon, leather and wood;
We will increase the amount of cotton we source from sustainable sources to 25% by 2015 and 50% by 2020;
By 2012 all the 10,000 farmers who supply us with fresh meat, dairy, produce and flowers will be part of ‘Farm for the Future’, our sustainable agriculture programme. In addition, by 2015 we will begin a plan to extend this to the 1000s of farmers producing meat and produce used as raw materials in prepared food;
We will ensure 75% of all our produce will be pesticide residue free by 2015, with the aim of extending this to 100% residue free for all our produce by 2020;
We will ban beam trawling in the fisheries we source from to prevent damage to the sea bed. From March this year none of the fish we sell will be caught using beam trawling - from fresh fish to ready meals such as fish pies;
We are the first retailer to sign the WWF’s Seafood Charter to ensure our entire range of seafood products come from sustainable sources, and commit to work with the WWF to protect our oceans and work towards sustainable fisheries management and sustainable farmed fish production; 
 
7. Health and wellbeing 
Goal: helping thousands of customers and employees choose a healthier lifestyle.
We will invest in scientific research to gain further knowledge around foods that are effective for weight loss (we are doing research on Simply Fuller Longer);
We are launching a campaign to improve the fitness of our customers and employees, in line with the Department of Health Change4Life strategy;
We are committed to working with producers to reduce saturated fat in dairy, one of the largest contributors to saturated fat in the diet;
We will introduce calorie labelling on alcohol to help customers understand the contribution to their diet;
We remain committed to our policy of never selling tobacco in M&S stores.
 
Marks & Spencer Customer ComRes Research
Environmental and social issues remain important to UK consumers. A ComRes survey, commissioned by M&S2, found that 72% of people are concerned about environmental issues, with 73% saying that the recession had not changed their level of concern. 
More than two thirds say that the working conditions of the people that manufacture goods is important to them and 75% of people want to know that suppliers treat animals well. 84% of people believe that we have a moral duty to reduce our impact on the environment and if things are made more convenient for us, 49% are willing to do more to help protect the environment. 
1 Refers to major retailers with national coverage and a worldwide supply chain. 
2 ComRes interviewed 2021 GB adults online between 19th and 20th February 2010. Data were weighted to be representative demographically of all GB adults. ComRes is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules. Full data tables available at
Press contacts:
Daniel Himsworth, 0208 718 1618, daniel.himsworth@marks-and-spencer.com 
Clair Foster, 0208 718 8323, clair.foster@marks-and-spencer.com 
Clare Wilkes, 0208 718 8642,