it’s not just green, it’s m&s green
January 18th 2007, 12:37 am
I did a lot of reading over Christmas. After spending several months being way down on my usual reading levels, I chewed through several books in a few days, but then in a Cumbrian winter there’s not much else to do. One I read, even though I knew it would get me angry (which it did) was Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence. I’ve been eyeing up the various supermarket exposes for a while but only just got round to reading one. It was the anger I wasn’t looking forward to and, as I said, it didn’t disappoint.
I already knew a lot of it – the exploitation of immigrant workers in this country and others, the outrageous demands supermarkets make of farmers and producers, not to mention the environmental cost – but there were still a few nuggets of new info to make my blood boil. One of which was an account of how Marks & Spencer sold green beans and baby corn grown in Kenya – I knew the stuff was air-freighted in but what I hadn’t realised was the packaging was air-frieghted out from the UK along with chives to tie bundles of veg together.
Which makes yesterday’s news that M&S will pull out all the stops to be greener than thou highly interesting. True, they’ve been doing some great stuff in various areas, especially fish, but they’ve still got a looooong way to go on things like packaging and food miles. Their new plan appear to address much of this and while they’ll still be flying food in, it will be clearly labelled, maybe with a ‘this product could be bad for the planet’ sticker. Or maybe not.
And there are lots of other boxes ticked – using waste food to as biomass for fuel, reducing energy consumption, offsetting as a last resort, eradicating plastic packaging in favour of corn starch materials… So, good on paper but I hope they follow through. To be fair, they do tend to put their money where their mouth is (£200m in this case) and with green policies now a key marketing tactic, hopefully their new policies will trickle down into the rest of the industry. Are you listening, Tesco?
