UK : Retailer to trial 1st UK coat hanger amnesty in eleven stores

New research reveals that there are over 530 million unwanted coat hangers stashed away in UK homes – and that almost 100 million of them go straight to landfill every year when they could be recycled.
The average Briton has 67 coat hangers in their home and 18% of these aren’t used. As a result almost a fifth (18%) of them end up in the bin. The remainder are gathering dust and taking up valuable storage space in lofts, garages and wardrobes.
M&S currently reuses or recycles all of its coat hangers that are not taken home by customers. In the last 15 years, the company has recycled over 1 billion coat hangers, saving over 32,000 tonnes of plastic from ending up as landfill.
As a result of the survey, M&S is trialling the first UK ‘coat hanger amnesty’ in eleven of its stores. Between 20th and 22nd September customers will be able to take any unwanted plastic coat hangers into any of the participating 11* M&S stores for recycling.
Guy Farrant, Director of Stores at M&S, said: “We’ve been reusing and recycling our hangers for 15 years but we know that many of our customers simply don’t know what to do with their unwanted hangers.
“This research has shown us that there could be almost 17,000 tonnes of unwanted plastic hangers sitting in our homes and they could very easily be recycled. We are hoping that our customers will dig them all out – not just M&S ones – and bring them into us so that we can recycle them.”
M&S customers are currently asked if they need their coat hanger with their purchase or if they would like it recycled instead.

Unwanted coat hangers are taken to a factory in Barnsley where they are hand sorted and then:
- All intact coat hangers are shipped back to M&S garment manufacturers in Europe to be reused
- Damaged hangers are reground and turned back into coat hangers
- Nothing is wasted – the metal hooks are melted down and reused
- Even the cardboard boxes used to house the hangers are reused at least four times then recycled.
At every stage of the process the coat hangers are ‘back freighted’ – transported from stores and back to Barnsley and then into Europe in M&S containers that would have previously been travelling back to their destination empty. This means that the handling of unwanted coat hangers isn’t using unnecessary fuel or resulting in additional carbon emissions.
The M&S coat hanger amnesty is the latest initiative to come out of M&S’ Plan A ‘eco-plan’ that was launched in January 2007.
Guy Farrant adds: “Under Plan A we are looking at every single part of our UK operation over the next five years. By 2012 we aim to be carbon neutral, sending no waste to landfill and using sustainable raw materials where we can. As part of this we have pledged to develop simple solutions to help our customers make positive changes too. Recycling coat hangers instead of binning them is just one of the things we can all do to help reduce our environmental impact.”