Reducing and reusing plastic and packaging is a vital step on our journey to net zero. Under Plan A 2030, we are committed to making 100% of our packaging widely recyclable. In March 2026 we achieved the milestone for our plastic packaging meeting a minimum of 30% recycled content, which helped us reduce reliance on virgin materials.
In Foods, we have continued to remove plastic across our range, including switching teacake packaging from plastic film to widely recycled FSC-accredited paper, replacing hard-to-recycle plastic wrapping on a larger range of our tomatoes with fully recyclable cardboard punnets, and moved all of our mushrooms from plastic trays into card.
In Cards & Wrap, our wrapping paper is cellophane-free, and our Christmas cards, gift bags, gift tags and wrapping paper are made with FSC-certified paper and vegetable- or water-based inks (not traditional petroleum-based inks).
In Fashion, Home and Beauty, we continue to reduce plastic in our products and supply chain, including plastic-free cashmere jumpers, hanger consolidation across women's leggings, joggers and socks, and reduced packaging on Sartorial shirts.
Carrier Bags
Closed-loop, reusable bags made from our own plastic waste are the most sustainable choice for customers who do need a bag at the till.
We encourage our customers to use fewer bags and reuse the bags they already own. We were the first UK retailer to charge for single-use plastic bags in 2008, and since then, when customers forget their reusable bag, we sell 100% FSC paper bags. We no longer offer single-use shopping bags and have removed plastic single-use small produce bags from our Foodhalls.
Online packaging
Online orders are the parts of the M&S experience that arrive in our customers' homes, so the materials we use here are some of the most visible signals of our packaging strategy.
Our current online delivery bags are made from 100% recycled plastic and is fully recyclable through our plastic takeback scheme, which accepts all types of plastic that some local authorities will not collect. We have switched to paper tape on our cardboard boxes (instead of plastic), saving over 2.7million metres of plastic tape annually, and our cardboard boxes are 100% recyclable in customers' kerbside recycling.
Hangers
A simple till-side hanger swap by every customer adds up to billions of hangers diverted from waste over the lifetime of the scheme.
We run a closed-loop hanger reuse programme. When customers buy clothing in our stores, we ask them to leave the M&S hanger at the till, where it goes into a hanger-collection box to be returned to garment suppliers for reuse, or recycled into new hangers. Since launching the scheme in 2007, our customers have helped us divert over 1 billion hangers from landfill.
Plastic Take Back
Some plastics, including crisp packets, yoghurt lids and clothing-multipack bags, are not collected by most local-authority kerbside schemes; takeback gives every customer a route to recycle them.
We have introduced dedicated plastic-collection facilities at all our M&S-owned stores in the UK and Republic of Ireland, so customers can return plastic packaging from any product, including types that are difficult to recycle at home.
We have used this hard-to-recycle material to create ‘Buddy Benches’, which we donated to schools across the country along with Young Minds. We’re always looking for innovative uses for this material that our customers return to us.
In Beauty, through our in store recycling scheme, used beauty packaging are transformed into new products. For example, this included working with our beauty packaging recycling partner, Handle, to included 250,000 combs in our Beauty Advent Calendar.
Refill and reuse remove single-use packaging from the basket altogether, giving customers the most direct way to take a circular choice into their everyday shop.
Our Refilled scheme is now available in around 25 stores across the country, offering own-brand homecare products including cleaning sprays, laundry detergents, fabric conditioners and washing-up liquids. A small deposit is applied to each bottle and refunded as a discount on the next purchase when the bottle is returned. Over 30,000 bottles have been returned via the scheme so far.
