Green Thing Blog

This week, M&S announced their intention to become the world's most sustainable retailer by 2015.

Sounds good. Not least because it sets a standard for more supermarkets to follow. But what does it mean in practice?

Well, sustainability is not a new goal for M&S. Plan A, the project they launched in 2007, has already had a measurable impact:

- Stores are now 10% more energy efficient
- Logisitics are 20% more fuel efficient
- Food packaging has reduced by 16%
- Over 50% of wood is FSC or recycled
- Food carrier bag use has reduced by 83%
- Customers have been encouraged to recycle 2 million garments a year
- 7 million garments sold per year have been made from Fairtrade cotton
- All eggs are free range
- All artificial colours, flavours and trans-fats have been removed from food

It's a great start. And perhaps the most surprising part of all of this is that it's helped them *save* £50 million this year. Yes indeed, sustainability has been the recession-friendly option. 

Most sustainable retailer by 2015

So what's M&S planning to do over the next five years to make this happen?

Well, here are some of the highlights. They're promising to:

- build Plan A into each of the 2.7 billion M&S products sold each year by 2020 (50% of products by 2015)

- help 1 million M&S customers develop their own personal Plan A by 2015 and (3 million by 2020)

- launch a £100,000 prize called Your Green Idea for the best customer idea to help green M&S

- offer staff free loft insulation and a paid day's leave to volunteer in the community

- launch a £50 million internal innovation fund to help find the breakthrough technologies of the future

- engage 10,000 farmers in their Sustainable Agriculture Programme

- engage all food suppliers with a balanced scorecard of social, environmental and lean manufacturing requirements

- ensure clothing suppliers pay a fair living wage in the least developed countries they source from, starting with Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka

- source key raw materials (soya, palm oil, coffee, tea, cocoa and leather) from places that don't contribute to deforestation

- increase clothing recycling from 2 million garments per year to 20 million.

All very good to hear, we think you'll agree. And we're very happy to spot Plan A's commitment to Plug out in their Turn it off tip :-)

They sum up their goal as: "every M&S product, customer and supplier engaged." And they add "In aiming to become the most sustainable major retailer in the world we are mindful that we have no monopoly on commitment or performance in our sector. Nor does it diminish our commitment to work in partnership with others. However, we believe a commitment to lead is a powerful statement that sustainability matters and is integral to our future business success."

Good work M&S. I know where I'll be buying my groceries next week...

You can find out more about all the changes being made by Plan A at plana.marksandspencer.com

And you can enter Your Green Idea now by visiting www.yourgreenidea.co.uk

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The British Council and Julie's Bicycle, a non-profit making company, launched a campaign to encourage artists to get involved in helping to combat climate change. The publication, called 'Long Horizons', is a compilation of five essays written by Jay Griffiths, KT Tunstall, Antony Gormley (image below), Professor Tim Jackson and Professor Diana Liverman.

As Alison Tickell underlines in her introduction, each contributor 'has interpreted the relationship between art and sustainability personally, so that science and art, both calling on creativity of the highest order, blur as disciplines.' She also highlights the fact that in order to be effective, the effort should be collective. In this regard, art and culture are thought as a crystallization of contemporary issues and should be used as communication tools in order to convey a message. She emphasizes that 'Now [post-Copenhagen] more than any other time we need to bring some fresh voices, fresh perspective into climate change.'

The British Council and Julie's Bicycle's publication was launched on Tuesday 15^th February 2010 in the presence of Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who emphasized that Long Horizons 'summarizes the beautiful things that are at risk of climate change but also the positive aspects of life that we can benefit from.'    

Behind this communication lies an old question: 'What is art good for?', a question which was already in the air in Britain in the 1960s during the industrialization era. It had invited the critic Matthew Arnold to write 'Culture and Anarchy' in 1869 in which he stated that all great artists are imbued with 'the aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they find it.'

'Long Horizons' is available here.

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There's a new website in town, Part-Time Carnivore, which encourages you to go easy on the meat.

You're no doubt aware that by cutting our meat consumption we can reduce both our carbon footprints and our demand on the world's agricultural land. However, as a nation of meat-lovers we don't relish the possibility of giving it up!

Therefore, Part-Time Carnivore is attempting to make the subject of meat reduction a tasty idea to the meat-loving majority. They have five options that are designed to suit different lifestyles: Meat-Free Mondays, Vegging-Out, Meat-On/Meat-Off, Meating-Out or Meaty Sundays.

Each option comes with estimated weekly savings of land and CO2 and the website keeps a running total for everyone who signs up. At the same time as cutting consumption, part-time carnivores are encouraged to swap intensively reared imported meat for locally sourced alternatives.

Read the article and now feeling peckish?  Quick, watch something easy on the meat.

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Postcarden have come up with the most brilliant of ideas.  They've combined a garden with a greeting card - a minature allotment through the post.

When sprinkled with a few drops of water, the 'crop' of cress grows over the course of a week and will last for 2-3 weeks! You can watch a demo here.

The printing is done by Ethical Packaging, the seeds and card are all UK sourced and it goes to show you don't need a much space to start your own mini Good Life.

Yum, egg sarnies anyone?

[Spotted on Springwise]

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Sometimes, all we need is the air that we breathe - but that's easier said than done. Many Americans inhale the equivalent pollution of smoking a pack a day.

Apparently in central London, breathing the air is equivalent to smoking 30 cigarettes a day because of road traffic pollution (in Oxford it's over 3 packs a day).

[Spotted on 100 Months]

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