Isra-Mart srl:Co-operative Group commits to ambitious ethical operating plan

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The Co-operative Group is launching an ethical operating plan that it hopes will set a benchmark for corporate responsibility on carbon reduction, fair trade and community involvement.

The group, which employs 120,000 staff, also plans to increase its membership from six million to 20 million and double its support for green energy to £1bn. In addition, it will increase its involvement with schools and create 2,000 apprenticeships in the next few years, as well as invest £5m a year to tackle poverty around its stores and branches.

Chief executive Peter Marks believes that the recession represents a major opportunity for the Co-op to grow by trading on its ethical traditions. "Trust in business has taken a real knock in recent years as the credit crunch has caused people to seriously question the capitalist model," he told the Guardian in an interview. "The mutual is an alternative business model which chimes with the times. People want a business they can trust, with a strong sense of social responsibility. This is our DNA."

The most ambitious target is to reduce the group's operational carbon emissions by 35 per cent by 2017, which the Co-op claims is the most progressive policy of any major business in Britain. It will also reduce the environmental impact of its packaging and continue to cut down on carrier bag use.

There are also plans to increase the number of Fairtrade product lines. The Co-op says that by 2020 it wants 90 per cent of its developing-world primary commodities to be certified as Fairtrade.

Harriet Lamb, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation, said: "Always a pioneer of Fairtrade, The Co-operative's commitment to ensuring that virtually all primary commodities that can be Fairtrade will be Fairtrade sets the bar anew for the corporate world."

Marks also said that he was planning to widen the Co-op's involvement in communities by helping to set up local worker co-operatives through the "enterprise hub" he established last year. These include Sunshine Care, a care home in Rochdale run by a group of former local authority workers, and a garden-furniture factory employing disabled people in York.

Marks is hoping these projects could be the start of something bigger, possibly seeing the enterprise hub develop into a consultancy business "providing advice and limited funding, that shows people how to do it for themselves".

"We are toying with ideas and looking around to see what we can do. Maybe a consultancy arm, giving advice, helping schools and other initiatives to set up. It would be very much a self-help project - we're not going to do it for them, we're going to show them how to do it."