Your Green Idea

We'd like to say a huge thank you to everyone who entered Your Green Idea.

We’ve had over 1,200 entries to read through and evaluate over the last couple of weeks. This was a fabulous response and we’re delighted that so many of you took the time to enter.

Your Green Idea set out to capture brand new ideas that could really change the way M&S customers shop – for the better of the environment.

We received a wide range of ideas. From the quirky – using hamsters to power our tills, to the more practical – like extending our Oxfam Clothes Exchange.

However, we had lots of ideas that were very similar to initiatives that we are already putting into place or currently working on. For example, someone had the clever idea of converting the polystyrene trays underneath our pizzas to cardboard. This is something we’ve already been working on for some time – in fact all of our pizza packaging will be polystyrene-free from the end of July this year.

So what’s the outcome?

This presented our judging panel with a big challenge though – did we have three brilliant new ideas to put forward to the public vote?

After much deliberation, our judges collectively agreed that we didn’t actually have three brand new brilliant ideas that would meet our criteria of fitting with what we do at M&S, having a sufficiently significant environmental benefit, and allowing our 21 million customers to take part. This was a really tough decision to make, particularly as our judges truly valued the amount of effort that had gone into the entries.

However, there were three ideas that we felt deserved special recognition, and the entrants who suggested these will each receive £5,000 to donate towards their chosen organisation to spend on a sustainability project.

Charlotte Barker, of West Sussex, suggested that M&S could collect and then recycle existing furniture from customers' homes when delivering new furniture, and incentivise customers to take part in the scheme by offering a money-off voucher for their next M&S purchase.

Patrick Creed, of County Galway, put forward the idea of offering customers the opportunity to sign-up for electronic till receipts. This would allow them to have their receipts sent to them by email, rather than being printed out in store, and additionally, receive helpful green tips and offers from M&S.

Jacqueline Harrison, of Lancashire, had the idea of creating ‘eco classrooms’ in some of our stores where children could learn more about the environment and how to care for it, as well as finding out about where M&S products come from and how they are made.

What will M&S do with the rest of the prize money?

The remainder of the prize money won’t go to waste. As promised, M&S will invest this money in one or more sustainability projects and we’ll be working closely with our judges to determine how best to do this. We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve reached a decision.

In the meantime, thank you once again to all of you who took part. We’re committed to becoming the world’s most sustainable major retailer by 2015 and we can only do that with your ongoing support.