M&S Plan A Progress Update

Marks & Spencer have provided an update on their Plan A (a five-year ‘eco-plan’) and say that 17 of their 100 commitments have already been delivered. One of the more progressive achievements has been to turn food-waste into power.

In November 2007 they started to use food waste to power some of their stores using an anaerobic digester which takes household food waste and converts it into electricity. They also want to turn farm fodder into energy too: an anaerobic digester will be located on a farm later this year and will be fuelled by cow slurry and agricultural crops.

Other achievements they say they have made include:

* CO2 emissions in stores, offices, warehouses and delivery vehicles reduced by nearly 50,000 tonnes, which is a 9% decrease on last year, despite opening 103 new stores.
* Over 4.8 million Fairtrade cotton garments sold across womenswear, menswear, lingerie, kidswear and homewear product ranges. Fairtrade food and drink sales up 20% to £100m.
* Organic food sales up over 40% to £145 m across 590 different product lines. Over 700,000 organic cotton, wool and linen garments sold and 300,000 garments, including fleeces, made from 4 million recycled PET plastic bottles.
* Eat Well food sales were up 4% with sales of £1.4 bn across 1,100 lines.

M&S have also started to charge 5p for their plastic bags as part of their plan to reduce carrier bag usage by a third and send no waste to landfill from its operations by 2012.

The press release here provides a lot of detail on their progress.

Marks & Spencer Plan A