Plastic clothes hanger menace at an end as Marks & Spencer announces an amnesty

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Chances are at least a dozen are lying around your home, waiting to trip up the unwary.

But now could be the time to act against the menace of unused coat hangers.

Marks & Spencer has declared an amnesty on all plastic hangers, from whatever store, inviting the public to return them for recycling.

Research suggests Britain has 540 million surplus coat hangers, weighing 17,000 tons.

It is suggested as many as 100million a year are thrown away and sent to landfill, where they take more than 100 years to degrade.

M&S is inviting shoppers to return any hangers for recycling

The average British home has 67 hangers, with 12 of them unused.

The trial amnesty will be held next week, between September 20 and 22, at 11 stores around the country. If successful it will spread nationwide.

M&S already reuses or recycles the hangers which customers choose not to take home. They are taken to be sorted in Barnsley, in lorries which would normally leave stores empty after making a delivery.

All intact hangers are shipped back to garment manufacturers to be reused, while damaged ones are ground down into pellets to be turned back into hangers.

Even the metal hooks are melted down and reused. On the down side, the amnesty will not apply to the flimsy metal hangers dished out in their billions by dry cleaning outlets.

The stores running the scheme are at Queen Street, Cardiff; Argyle Street, Glasgow; Northumberland Street, Newcastle, Market Street, Manchester; Greenhithe, Kent; Cornwall Street, Plymouth; Merry Hill Centre, West Midlands; Queensgate Centre, Peterborough; High Street Kensington, West London; Hillsborough Road, Lisburn, Northern Ireland; and Liffey Valley shopping centre, County Dublin.