M&S looks to adopt electronic duty of care

The announcement came today (June 7) as the retail giant published its How We Do Business Report 2012 which gives an update on its performance since launching its Plan A initiative in 2007 which outlined its targets for sustainability.

Notably, the report highlights that in February 2012 the firm achieved zero waste to landfill.

Commenting on this success Mandy Keepax, head of facilities for offices, store cleaning, waste and pest control at M&S, told letsrecycle.com: We are absolutely thrilled to announce that we have achieved zero waste lo landfill. This was a huge goal and when it was set five years ago we werent sure how we were going to achieve this.

We engaged in a piece of education with all of our store and head office colleagues and the general merchandise distribution centres. Making them understand what a difference it made and that it was a huge part of our Plan A business, really started to bring results in. It was a behavioural change which really made a difference.

Electronic

And, M&S revealed support for the electronic duty of care being developed by the Environment Agency which it believes would allow it to more easily support its findings with hard data.

Commenting on the use of the electronic duty of care, Bernard Amos, director of Helistrat, which manages the delivery of M&Ss waste strategy, told letsrecycle.com: Going forward one important thing is IT. We have got it to monitor returns and the governments move to make waste transfer notes electronic is a massive opportunity. Currently we are engaging with Marks & Spencer at a national level to adopt the process. Its about making statements and being able to support it and back it up with data.

The Environment Agency is developing the electronic system, with the aim to go live in 2014, which could save businesses an estimated 5 million a year (see letsrecycle.com story).

Report

The report issued today by the retailer shows that it has reduced carrier bag consumption by 59% to 269 million bags in 2011/12 from 657million in 2006/07. Marks & Spencer is also on track to send all of its waste to composting and anaerobic digestion processes with 89% of all food waste sent to AD plants in 2011/12.

After achieving zero waste to landfill the company said it sent a minimal amount of waste to energy-from-waste incineration and that this was used as a last resort.

Mr Amos told letsrecycle.com: Incineration is the last resort and one of the targets going forward is to reduce the material going to MRFs [material recycling facilities] by better separation and then using better processes at the MRFs such as the one Viridor has opened. We want to then drive the percentage sent to incineration to an absolute minimum. No process can exclude a MRF but I do think its about driving down the percentage of material sent there.

The report also noted progress in reducing the amount of packaging produced and increasing the amount of clothes recycled through schemes such as Shwopping.

Future

The company said it plans to move forward with its Shwopping initiative, which was launched in April this year. Adam Elman, head of Plan A, said: We launched our Shwopping initiative which built on our relationship with Oxfam. This is all about how we help our customers. We launched it at the end of April and since then customer feedback has been positive. We are really excited by it this initiative. We have set ourselves a really big goal and we know we cant deliver it immediately but we will be able to build on it over the coming years.

Mr Elman also revealed that following the success of its relationship with Somerset county councils waste partnership which collected more than 12,500 tonnes of packaging in 2011/12 it would look to branch out with other local authorities, starting with Kent.

Mr Elman said: The Somerset Waste Partnership has been going really well. Its really about how do we look at new and innovative ways of doing things and supporting local authorities to support others for the greater good.

As for further projects, he said: It is something we keep under review and we have a number of initiatives where progress has been good so far. If it works we will look to see how we can drive scale upwards. We run a lot of tests and trials and see how they work and then we can get to the point where we can drive scale.

Mr Elman said the retailer will also continue its work with incentive scheme RecycleBank, which works with local authorities, as it looks to expand.