With the majority of customers now choosing to reuse their own shopping bags, M&S’ Director of Corporate Affairs Victoria McKenzie-Gould outlines why M&S is today replacing its plastic bags for life with paper carrier bags instead.

Picture this: You reach the checkout with a basket full of shopping at your local M&S, when suddenly you realise you’ve forgotten to bring your reusable bags. You really don’t want to add to the mountain of plastic bags you already have at home - but what else can you do? Not so long ago you probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but today we are all much more aware of our impact on the planet – especially when it comes to plastic.

Our customers have always pushed us to lead on the issues they care about most, from animal welfare to reducing food waste. And reducing single use plastic is right up there too, which is why we’ve been busy finding ways to use less and making it easier for our customers to do the same. Earlier in the year we introduced a ‘Bring Your Own Bag’ initiative to Click & Collect orders in Clothing & Home which will remove over 10 million units of plastic annually, and in Food where the majority of our plastic product packaging is used, we hit our target of removing 75 million pieces this year.

On plastic bags we were the first retailer to introduce carrier bag charging back in 2008 and since then we’ve been introducing new, more sustainable choices for customers, including large and incredibly durable bags like the Yinka Illori tote bag launched earlier this year, or bags for life made using recycled plastic, including material collected in our stores. Today over 70% of M&S customers are now choosing to bring their own bags or don’t use one at all when shopping with us. But now they want us to go further and find a solution which avoids plastic for those trips when they do need a bag.

So, we are taking the latest innovation in M&S Food which moved our popular rice and grains packaging to paper bags and boxes, removing 5.5 million units of plastic, and applying it to our carrier bags. From today every store across the UK will offer Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®) certified paper bags at checkouts. The bags are replacing our ecoloop plastic bags for life and sold alongside our range of durable tote bags, and we are introducing a strong, robust bag in Food and a simpler one in Clothing & Home reflecting our different shopping missions.

Our paper carrier bags have all the benefits of plastic bags but without the same environmental impact. The Food bags are super strong, capable of carrying over 15kg - equivalent to more than six four-pint bottles of 100% RSPCA Assured M&S milk. Both bags are water resistant, thanks to a natural resin applied in the manufacturing process, and have been independently tested to withstand over 100 reuses, with easy foldability into a backpack. And importantly they are also more convenient for customers to pop straight into their home recycling bins when worn out – unlike the plastic bags which generally need to be returned to specific soft plastic recycling units.

We wanted to come up with the best and most sustainable paper bag possible and make sure we answered the paper vs plastic question. So, we tasked the team at the University of Sheffield to undertake a cradle to grave assessment of the bags to determine which was better. They told us that if we were moving to paper, we needed to address four factors:

1. The paper bags needed to be responsibly sourced (FSC-certified®)
2. Produced with renewable energy as paper can use a lot of energy in production (our bags are sourced from a single hydro-powered paper mill in Scandinavia)  
3. We need to find another use for the plastic collected in our stores (watch this space!)
4. The bag needs to be capable of being used multiple times. They said at least 10 times, but as this is the factor that makes the most difference to how sustainable the bag is, we made it 100 times!

Having done this we now have a solution that is better environmentally and which helps customers looking to make small changes to reduce their environmental footprint. For the vast majority who already reuse their own bags, which remains the most sustainable option, not a lot will change. But on the odd occasion when we all need to reach for one more bag, we’re pleased to be offering a more sustainable option for customers. 

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