2Sustain

On Monday, Marks & Spencer (M&S), one of Britain’s largest retailers, announced a program to expand the green initiatives it launched in 2007 in hopes of becoming the world’s most sustainable retailer by 2015.

M&S first launched its ethical and eco plan, called Plan A, in January 2007. Its overall goals included making M&S carbon neutral, sending no waste from its operations to landfill, extending sustainable sourcing, setting new standards in ethical trading and helping customers and employees live a healthier lifestyle.

With this week’s announcement, the company has made a commitment to 80 ambitious new initiatives, many of which are going to major impacts on the M&S supplier network. For example, M&S is planning to:

• Convert 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 quality (e.g. carrying Fairtrade or Marine Stewardship Council certification or using free range or other sustainable ingredients). The company wants to convert 50 percent of its products by 2015 and 100 percent by 2020.

• Become the first major retailer to actively tackle and bring clarity to the living wage debate. M&S says it will do this by determining and agreeing to a fair, living wage before implementing a process to ensure its clothing suppliers pay this wage to their workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. Based on a successful pilot in Bangladesh, the company feels it can successfully work with its suppliers to improve productivity and management practices.

• Work with M&S suppliers to provide training and education programs– including ones about basic health care and workers’ rights – for 500,000 workers in their factories. (Sounds similar to Apple’s “Train the Trainer” program.)

• Help suppliers create 200 ‘Plan A’ factories with either ethical or environmental features, or both, and encourage the 10,000 farmers who produce fresh foods sold at M&S to join the company’s sustainable agriculture program.

• Source all cardboard for M&S food packaging via a single ‘model’ forest program.

• Become the first major retailer to ensure full traceability of all the key raw materials used in its clothing and home products including cotton, wool, polyester, nylon, leather and wood.

• Become the first major retailer to ensure that six key raw materials it uses – palm oil, soya, cocoa, beef, leather, coffee – come from sustainable sources that do not contribute to deforestation, one of the biggest causes of climate change.

In addition, M&S is pledging to collaborate with employees, customers, NGOs and other stakeholders to expand sustainability initiatives even further.The company wants to:

• Increase the number of clothing garments its customers recycle every year from two million to 20 million, including through a partnership with Oxfam, significantly reducing the tonnage of clothing sent to landfill.

• Launch a five-year £50m Plan A incubator fund to support the development of innovative new ‘Plan A’ products and services at M&S.

• Encourage 21 million M&S customers to live a more sustainable lifestyle 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 organization such as a school, charity or small business;

• Offer free home insulation and a free home energy monitor to all eligible M&S employees and giving them one paid, day-off a year to work in their local communities.

I agree with Sir Stuart Rose, Chairman of Marks & Spencer, who sees initiatives like these as critical components of risk management, competitive differentiators and fundamental pillars of business success today.

“Our extended Plan A will reach further and move us faster – covering every part of our business and reaching out to forests, farms, factories, lorries, warehouses and into our customers’ and employees’ homes,” he says. “We believe sustainability is a key ingredient of business success and that Plan A will continue to make us more efficient, develop new markets and build customer loyalty. It’s therefore not just the right thing to do morally but also makes strong commercial sense.”