Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540-544)
Mr Mike Barry, Mr Brian McCarthy, Mr Paul Ozanne
and Mr Alan Wheeler
4 MARCH 2008
Q540 Chairman: Mr Barry, can you
afford to get back to that idea?
Mr Barry: Can we take 60 million people on a
journey to that? Let us be clear about this. M&S has made
100 commitments over the next five years to change environmentally
and socially. To me, that is about softening the rough edges of
our existing business model. Will Marks & Spencer and all
retailers require a different kind of business model in ten, 15,
20 years' time, as Lord May was talking about? Quite probably,
yes. However, to leap to that new model, you have to go through
a series of steps that your business can cope with, your supply
chain can cope with and, more to the point, that M&S's 16
million customers can cope with. You have asked a question about
Oxfam, but let me tell you about what M&S has been doing today,
because I think it is a pointer to the future. For several years
now, M&S has been donating samples from its head office and
rejects that customers bring back to us to Shelter and the Birth
Defects Foundation, which would traditionally go to landfill but
now we donate them. They are selling them to raise money for important
causes. What we launched in January was a new thing. That is basically
saying to 16 million M&S customers, "After you have bought
a product from us, don't throw it away to landfill. Look at it
as an opportunity to bring it to an Oxfam store so that they can
sell it again, reuse it, extract an economic value from that to
use in their vital development work overseas. In return, we will
give you an incentive. We will give you a £5 voucher off
your next £35 spend on clothing at M&S". It has
been up and running for four weeks. I cannot share any detailed
figures with you at this stage. We will be reporting on that formally
some time later this summer. However, the response has been fantastic.
Tens of thousands of M&S customers have bought into a different
kind of model. Oxfam are seeing a significant uplift in their
sales; we are seeing a significant diversion of clothing from
landfill; and M&S has seen the benefit of more customers coming
back to its stores rather than going to its competitors. It is
a toe in the water. I am not going to sit here and say that it
has revolutionised the whole approach to consumption in the UK,
but it is an interesting model around what you can do. We have
therefore given the consumer an incentive to change. You might
have seen last week that we committed to starting to charge for
previously free food carrier bags, on the basis that we have done
the trial in Northern Ireland, where we are charging people about
5p for a previously free bag. Usage has plummeted by 70 per cent.
Again, customers have bought into it. Again, we have given them
a stick—"5p? Don't want to pay that"—but
we have given them a carrot; we give them a free bag for life
before you introduce charging and then you make sure that the
profits from it are ploughed back into their local community.
How do we recycle? Every time you buy one of the hundreds of millions
of items of clothing that M&S sells each year that comes on
a hanger, you walk to the till and you buy it; you are left with
a hanger. Do you take it home with you or do you throw it away?
For several years now we have been encouraging people to recycle
them; at the till point we take them back and reuse them or recycle
them. We have had a real push and drive on that, prompting people
at the till point, "Do you really need your hanger this time?"
and we have seen a 30 per cent uplift in hanger recycling—an
extra 20 or 30 million hangers this year that we recycle.
Q541 Baroness Platt of Writtle: I
just say, "No, I don't want a hanger", which is easier.
Mr Barry: Yes, exactly. What I am saying is
that, with the Oxfam model, the charging for carrier bags model,
and now the hanger recycling model, there are different ways to
start to engage consumers in change. It is a long, hard journey,
but you have to start changing your business model.
Chairman: Lord Howie, do you want to come in on this?
Q542 Lord Howie of Troon: There is
one question that I would like to ask—not about the clothing
exchange but about your eco-factories. Could you tell us what
they are, and so on?
Mr Barry: We have created three new eco-stores
in Marks & Spencer in the UK, in Bournemouth, Galashiels and
Pollok, to try new technologies to make our stores demonstrably
more sustainable for the future. Our learning from those three
stores is now being taken out to the hundreds of M&S normal
stores. We have then taken that model into our supply chain. We
are developing a model with an existing supplier in North Wales,
a furniture supplier, Westbridge, and three suppliers in Sri Lanka
and one supplier in China, to build radically different production
units for producing clothing. They will have a significantly lower
environmental impact in terms of carbon footprint and water use.
Again, I want to be very clear with you. The clothing manufacturing
unit is not the biggest part of the environmental impact of a
piece of clothing. That is the cotton field that produced it or
the dye-house that used the chemicals. However, if we can start
to make those individual building blocks of our value chain more
sustainable, let us look at how we do it. We have a conference
in our head office on 11 April. We are going to bring all our
other clothing suppliers in to share the results of the first
12 months of these eco-factories, to learn what they can start
to take out to change. You have to change not just the manufacturing
unit, where you have massive social issues to address as well
as environmental ones, but the dye-house and the spinning mill—and
it is the raw material production as well. It is a toe in the
water; a beginning, but an important one.
Q543 Lord May of Oxford: In so far
as some of the customers may want to be informed about the sustainability
and recyclability of the textiles they purchase, at the moment,
unless you have made a simple project of it yourself, you do not
have the information. If you were to put that information on a
label, do you think that it should be done voluntarily or that
there should be some code of practice or, alternatively, do you
think that it is just too complicated to even think of putting
it on a label?
Mr Barry: Labelling has its strengths and weaknesses.
50 per cent of consumers do not register the price of a product
they put in the basket, and price is by a long way the most important
driver for your decision-making in a shop. The next thing you
can ask somebody to look at is health. We will shift briefly to
food. Everybody is now putting these traffic lights on food: the
reds, greens and ambers to say whether it has too much fat, salt
or sugar in it. We have done that now for a year on 800 of our
5,000 products. It has had no demonstrable impact on sales. It
has not shifted behaviour. So I am not looking at the price on
the product; I am not really registering health as an issue. The
next thing down is the packaging. I heard the debate with the
previous group of witnesses. Packaging is the problem for the
consumers, left in their kitchen. It is not my problem: it is
their problem. There is therefore, rightly, a huge push on us
to make sure that we can reduce the amount of packaging we use.
We started to put WRAP labels on all our packaging to say what
to do with it, including, "Sorry, you've got to put that
in the bin". That takes you to the next level of decision-making.
There are a lot of questions now about carbon labelling. Should
you put a carbon label on products? Let me give you a clothing
example of that. You could put a carbon label on this suit or
on any item of clothing that M&S sells; but I know that 80
per cent of the carbon footprint of the clothing is associated
with the wash cycle—what you do with it after I have sold
it to you. If I can encourage you to wash it at 300C rather than
400C and above, there is much more impact on the carbon footprint
than anything I can do back down the supply chain. We do not need
a new carbon label for that, however. There is wash temperature
advice. It has been there for 50 years and people are well used
to it. It says, "You could wash it at 40 but I would like
to encourage you to wash it at 30"; so there is already carbon
labelling on a product that people understand. The fifth level
is can I put a label on this product to say, "No children
made it. All the wool in it is from a sustainable source. No dodgy
chemicals in it. Totally recyclable"? I think that you would
drive the average consumer crazy at this stage. There are different
ways of raising awareness of issues. You can use your website
or information in store but for an on-product label it is very
difficult. Let me finish off by explaining the cost of that. M&S
sells 35,000 different product lines, virtually all of which are
under its own label; we do not sell other people's products, by
and large. As soon as you start putting a label on a product that
says, "This is its environmental and social footprint",
every time you shift the cotton field that produced the cotton
or the apple farm that produced the apple—which you do frequently—you
have to change the label.
Q544 Lord May of Oxford: In the interests
of time, I myself thought it was a basically silly idea, and you
are saying it is a silly idea.
Mr Barry: Yes.
Mr Wheeler: I just wanted to bring up an issue
that Mike Barry raised about the carbon impact of textiles. There
was some research that came out recently, published by the Institute
for Manufacturing at Cambridge University, which actually looked
at the environmental impacts of a cotton T-shirt and a viscose
blouse. It is true to say that a significant majority of the carbon
impact of the cotton T-shirt was during the use phase of the customers.
When they looked at the viscose blouse, however, as a representative
example of garments made from synthetic fibres, they found that
the majority of the impact was still in the production phase.
I just wanted to clarify that. I get the feeling that textile
manufacturers and retailers have got hold of the cotton example;
they have used that and they are purporting that to be the case
across the entire range of fibres. This research shows that it
is not the case—but that is just one example.
Mr Ozanne: A very quick point and somewhat of
a warning, if I may. We have been in the industry a long time
and we want to be in it for a long time to come. The textile reuse
trade is viable at the moment; but if we are successful in collecting
sufficient clothing and the markets for its reuse dry up, the
whole thing will collapse and it will collapse extremely quickly.
Therefore, there is a focus needed to find new markets, innovative
markets, and ways of disassembling clothes so that they can be
used as other things besides clothing.
Mr Wheeler: There was one other thing that I
wanted to bring across; that is, as a means of finding new markets
we need to close the recycling loop. One thing we could do is
inform the public about how they can recycle their clothes and
buy recycled clothes. A simple eco-label with, say, a percentage
mark saying "So many per cent of this garment is made from
recycled fibre", is just one way in which this could be done.
You have to start somewhere.
Mr McCarthy: The Defra road map reinforces the
point made by Lord May, which is that we are sitting on a potential
time bomb of garments that are in storage in the home environment.
There are garments that have been stored in wardrobes, which potentially
could be released at some stage. The second brief point is that
I do hope this will be a generational issue. I am aware that at
Wellington School in Trafford it is the pupils who very much are
the ones driving towards the recycling of products. I think that
with the education of the consumer that Mike has mentioned, but
also addressing education in the national curriculum, the message
can be got across.
Chairman: I am very grateful to you, gentlemen. It
has been a useful, helpful session. If there is an afterthought,
let us know and, if we find that there is some gap in your evidence,
we will be after you. Thank you very much.
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