Marks & Spencer Fairtrade Pure Cotton Crew Neck Top Full Review
Posted: 14 March 2008 by Rikke Bruntse-Dahl
We know Marks & Spencer is the largest buyer of Fairtrade cotton in the world -- last year it bought one third of all Fairtrade-certified cotton -- and we know the retailer is good at basics like socks, underwear and t-shirts. Put the two together and you've got a whole lot of Fairtrade cotton basics. It could be as simple as that, but finding out what we wanted about the one particular t-shirt we tried turned out to be far from simple.
The first thing that really surprised us was the price. Contrary to what we had expected, it was really cheap -- £7 for a long-sleeved Fairtrade cotton top. It's very basic, fair enough, but we're so used to seeing Fairtrade products being considerably more expensive than their conventional counterparts. At £7 it's only £2 more than New Look's non-Fairtrade equivalent.
The second shocker was the choice of colours. The bunch of tops we looked at ranged from pastel to psychedelic, and while we really liked that, we couldn't help wondering how environmentally friendly -- or toxic -- the dyes were. And now that we're at it, it would also be good to know if M&S went beyond what the Fairtrade standards for eco-friendliness require. There wasn't any easily accessible information about this in the public domain, but with some help from M&S, we found the company's Environmental Code of Practice. In general it looks good, but there still isn't any information available specifically on M&S' Fairtrade t-shirts.
What we do know is that the top we tried is certified Fairtrade and that the cotton comes from India, Mali, Cameroon or Senegal, where the famers get a fair price and social premium for their cotton in line with Fairtrade standards. A producer story about the cotton specifically used for women's t-shirts wouldn't have gone amiss here. The tops are sewn in Sri Lanka, where M&S frequently audits the factories to check they comply with the retailer's Global Sourcing Principles and eventually the Ethical Trading Initiative base code (M&S is a member of ETI).
Using Fairtrade cotton is part of M&S' famous Plan A, the five-year 100-point CSR plan, which has generally given M&S heaps of credibility when it comes to green and ethical issues and transparency. Before Plan A, M&S pledged in its Look Behind The Label campaign to use less harmful dyes in its clothing range. With Plan A it promised to use more organic cotton.
We know the retailer has joined the Better Cotton Initiative, which aims to help cotton farmers across the world to farm in a more environmentally friendly way and the company does have 'dye standards', but it's all very general. We found it basically impossible to find out how environmentally friendly this particular t-shirt is.
Green and ethical interests aside, this long-sleeved crew neck top is not bad at all as far as cotton t-shirts go. It's not a luxury garment, but it's got a good fit, it doesn't lose its shape too badly when washed and is generally fine for what it's meant to be: a basic, casual cotton top. It's great for wearing with jeans, underneath a cardi or for yoga classes.
If only there had been more information available, particularly on the green side of things, we would have been quite happy with this little number.
Quality
Value
Ethics
Green
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