We are able to donate various bakery products, produce, flowers and ambient products. By law we are unable to donate any products that have gone past their ‘use by’ date but this is an area the industry is doing some research into. As a largely chilled business this is especially pertinent to us and is of particular interest. Having said this, the current categories of donated products represent up to 45% of our daily waste units.

Whilst we’re doing as much as possible to reduce the amount of waste we create in the first place and redistributing what we can there is inevitably a residual portion of waste. This is sent to anaerobic digestion plants. This ultimately creates electricity some of which M&S buys back for its own energy supply and produces digestate which can be used as a fertiliser.