Coat hanger amnesty declared by British store

LONDON (Reuters) - Amnesties are normally reserved for weapons or criminals but a British store has found a new offender to pardon -- the coat hanger.

Clothes-to-food retailer Marks & Spencer called on Britons on Wednesday to ferret out unwanted plastic coat hangers lurking in their closets and return them to its stores from September 20-22 for recycling.

A YouGov survey commissioned by M&S showed the average Briton has 67 coat hangers, 18 percent of which are not used. That could amount to 17,000 tones of unwanted plastic hangers, the retailer said.

"We are hoping that our customers will dig them all out, not just M&S ones, and bring them into us so that we can recycle them," said Guy Farrant, director of stores at M&S.

Intact hangers will be shipped to M&S garment makers in Europe. Those that are damaged will be ground down and turned into new ones.

M&S said the hanger amnesty was part of its "Plan A" environmental program, under which it is aiming to be carbon neutral and to dump no waste in landfill sites by 2012.