When Stuart Rose was knighted earlier this month, his favourite congratulatory present was a wormery, which has joined the three compost heaps in his Suffolk garden. It's the perfect project for the CEO of Marks & Spencer which, a year ago, pledged to seeing through the 100-point Plan A to improve its green policy in all areas, from reducing carrier bags and packaging to setting up an anaerobic digester in Shropshire to turn food waste into power and thus avoid sending food to landfill sites.
'At the end of year one our customers are beginning to get it and so are our staff,' he says. 'But Plan A is a journey and when we wrote it last year we didn't have the knowledge to get to some of these places, but we're getting there. And you've got to plant the flagpole and maybe instead of getting there via ABCD it will be BDCA.'
A trim 58-year old, Rose is a good example of green behaviour. He grew up all over the place in the Fifties (his father was in the RAF), so switching off lights came automatically, as did frugality with food - particularly at his Quaker boarding school ('They taught me respect for others and the importance of putting something back into the community'). He believes in putting his own house in order primarily and the rest will follow: gym once a week, a five-mile run at weekends (if he's in London he runs beside the river) and watching what he eats, particularly on the corporate lunch and dinner circuit.
'I shudder to remember lunches in the Seventies at somewhere like the RAC club where you'd have two bottles of wine and fall out of there at 4pm.' Now he's given up alcohol for January and says he sleeps better and has more energy. To prove this it is nine o'clock in the morning and this is his second meeting. Bentley's Oyster Bar in central London has been chosen for its convenience and because Rose is very partial to eating there. Today he is particularly taken by the Isle of Wight mackerel and insists that we taste it. Don't be surprised if it crops up in M&S by the end of the year.
'I do think we're guilty of gluttony now, there's too much food wastage, people have eyes bigger than their stomachs. My mother was very good at using up leftovers and I'm pretty good at turkey soup and cooking up yesterday's potatoes with a fried egg on top.' Currently separated from his wife, one culinary certainty in the Rose house is that every Friday night he eats M&S Chicken Jalfrezi - 'the best there is because it's made in large batches, no additives, no preservatives and left for 24 hours so all the spices infuse. Great value for £3.49. And I cook perfect rice in 20 minutes the way my mother taught me.'
He rarely cooks from cookery books and says the dish at which he probably excels is a joint of lamb on the bone cooked in olive oil and rosemary with a rice-and-tomato sauce.
He is rueful for his one un-green hobby - flying his four-seater Cessna plane from Biggin Hill. 'It requires such concentration and precision that it's the only place where I never think about work.' But he says he makes a positive effort to offset his carbon footprint.
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had a huge impact on him. 'It wasn't a Damascene moment, but I think the guy has a point. The other person who deserves credit is the Prince of Wales, whom we used to tease in the Seventies about talking to plants, but nine-tenths of what he said has come to be right.' Rose is realistic that Plan A is a long-term project due to the size of its scope. He also thinks central government needs to take a firmer approach to recycling and give it nationwide guidelines (naturally, he has talked to them about it), and the public should be given clear advice on food information rather than having both the Traffic Light and Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) which he thinks is confusing.
He says the big supermarkets do all talk to each other about issues, which is encouraging. M&S is trialling carrier-bag charging in the south-west on the strength of the 5p bag charge imposed in Northern Ireland, which resulted in a 66 per cent reduction in the number of bags used. M&S sells only Fairtrade coffee and tea and use only Fairtrade sugar in their jams and conserves. Suppliers have been told to avoid using palm oil and they've pledged a fixed six-month price for milk to farmers. Their Christmas turkeys were all free-range and they were named Compassionate Supermarket 2007 by Compassion in World Farming. They have also topped Greenpeace's league table for sustainable fishing for two years running (they employ a marine technologist).
Rose and the store are taking Plan A extremely seriously - they now sell rainwater butts, compost bins, low-energy lightbulbs. Staff are trained politely to discourage you from taking the clothes hangers with you.
He patrols his stores assiduously but he doesn't always encounter a pro-green public. 'A lady accosted me in the Bournemouth store recently and ticked me off because her cat doesn't like the new organic catfood. I gave her three tins and told her to give it another try. You can't always win.'
