Plan A because there is no Plan B. That’s the motto of Marks and Spencer’s eco-plan. Recycling bins crop up around you local M and S encouraging the community to recycle. Their plan is noble, but there is an elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.

In my mixed experience of going into various super-stores it has been Marks and Spencer that makes me most angry. For set out amongst their ethical goodies and uniformly ordered stores is a whole mountain of unnecessary packaging. Some days it appears as though the whole store is wrapped up plastic or card!

‘Make a pledge to reuse things instead of throwing them away. Recycling is good, but reusing is better. See how much you can reduce the contents of your rubbish bin by finding new uses for packaging. Difficultly 1 star.’ The M and S eco-pledge site tells you it’s easy to re-use things. Indeed it is, but didn’t they forget the ‘reduce’ that comes before the ‘reuse’. We don’t want everything in boxes, think of the oils that it takes to generate the plastic, think of the trees it take to generate the card, in this immaculately packaged environment M and S have taken a wrong turn. This forgot that it was their responsibility to cut back as well. We want food not packaging.

The one thing that annoys me most? M and S customers stuffing their Hessian eco-bags with packaging (far less green than plastic carrier bags), in the self righteous, I am better than thou way, that M and S customers tend to have. Analogous to 4×4 Porsche drivers with National Trust stickers in their windows, these idiots just don’t get it. If this is what Plan A looks like we are screwed, as are our children.