There is a tendency for people who try to sell you things to exaggerate the qualities and properties of what they sell. In modern times we smile at the propaganda of advertisements of many years ago. They seem so childish, but they worked because people believed them, not wanting to think that the manufacturers of toothpaste, soap or even carbolic smoke balls had set out to scam them.
Nowadays advertisers and merchandisers hone in on the words “green” and “organic” to sell their wares. Retailers like Marks & Spencer appeared to have created a “green” profit centre, where none existed before.
Let me explain in the hope that I do not misrepresent what Marks & Spencer are up to. Some time ago Mr Brown, the UK’s Prime Minister, made a speech in which he decried the habit of single use plastic bags of the kind given away by supermarkets. These plastic bags can take a century to decompose, and possibly longer. They cannot be easily recycled and they fill up land fills often escaping in the wind like horrid white birds to litter our countryside.
Marks & Spencer, that doyen of food and clothing retailing decided that plastic bags were an environmental hazard. They could have stopped supplying them and provided paper bags for their customers. They could have also reduced the unnecessary packaging that adorns much of their food outlets and our landfill sites.
Instead of adopting either of these courses of action Marks & Spencer decided that they would start charging people for plastic bags, in order to discourage their use. The charge would only be 5 pence (a dime in the USA) but if you do a weekly shop at Marks & Spencer using their plastic bags you might well end up with a dozen of the beasts, which would cost you 60 pence under the new charging regime.
With great fanfare Marks & Spencer’s chief executive no less announced that Marks and Spencer would not profit from this initiative – the money raised would go to Groundworks, an admirable environmental charity of whom I have a great deal of respect. Groundworks do good work.
I cannot value the air time on national TV and in national newspapers that this initiative got for Marks & Spencer. I think that the media missed the point – the angle they took was that Marks & Spencer were doing something environmentally good but the point was at the time that it was such a modest step and they could have done so much better. They were taking, I said at the time, a step which cost them nothing.
A couple of weeks ago I lugged a hemp bag laden with some shopping into my local Marks & Spencer to get some items. When I got to the till to pay for my purchases I noticed a small sign explaining about the 5 pence charge for plastic bags. It did not say that the five pences would go to Groundworks, but that the profit from the five pences would go to Groundworks.
So, before the initiative Marks and Spencer paid for the plastic bags themselves as a service to their customers. After the initiative the customers pay for the plastic bags with the profits going to charity. Under the guise being “green” Marks & Spencer have got the public to pay for plastic bags!
Is it any wonder that the public are cynical about “green” initiatives?
Filed under: carbon emissions, climate change, global warming, gordon brown, pollution, propaganda | Tagged: food packaging, green profit centre, groundworks, landfill, marks & spencer, plastic bags, single use plastic bags
Excellent piece. From the very beginning, this has, for me, smacked of a PR stunt. It’s simply too easy. M&S is not waging an environmental war. It is not fighting the good fight. This is simply a policy to attract attention. If they were genuinely concerned about the effects of plastic on the environment they’d be tackling the much greater issue of packaging. But are they? No. Because that would impact on their profit.
Incidentally, this might interest you:
http://garymurning.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/teen-decomposes-plastic-bag-in-three-months/