June 15th, 2023, Lesley Simeon
Marks & Spencer (M&S) has partnered with British recycling company Handle Recycling to launch a beauty packaging empties recycling scheme. The “Beauty Takeback Scheme” will run across 40 M&S stores and allow customers to deposit plastic or aluminum packaging materials and components like bottles, tubes, caps and pumps.
We look at YouGov data to see what the retailer’s current customers feel about recycling.
According to YouGov Profiles - which covers demographic, psychographic, attitudinal and behavioral consumer metrics - most of M&S customers (92%) say they always make an effort to recycle. The general British population isn’t too far behind as 89% of them say they always make an effort to recycle.
Profiles data also shows that similar proportions of the retailer’s customers and Britons in general (47% vs 48%) say they need help to reduce the amount of plastic they use. A smaller proportion, 18% of M&S customers and 23% of all Britons, say they want to recycle, but it takes too much of an effort. Perhaps the new M&S takeback scheme can help make recycling more convenient for this group to some degree.
In addition to collecting beauty packaging empties, M&S will recycle the collected materials and turn them into new packaging and products. Profiles data shows that 31% of M&S customers make an effort to buy more products made from recycled materials and 28% of them try to buy less items that have packaging that cannot be recycled.
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Methodology: YouGov Profiles is based on continuously collected data and rolling surveys, rather than from a single limited questionnaire. Profiles data for Great Britain is nationally representative and weighted by age, gender, education, region, and race. Learn more about Profiles.
Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash