It’s hard to talk to anybody about store design these days without matters environmental cropping up.

And the more of this there is, the more cynics gather and accuse retailers of greenwash when they mention the eco-agenda. Yet an awful lot is happening and retailers and designers alike now have green as a central plank of almost everything they do.

From Marks & Spencer, which has its all-encompassing Plan A – seemingly covering every conceivable aspect of green in retailing – to B&Q, which now has an eco-store in Halifax and is set to open another in New Malden, being aware of the consequences of retailing is top of mind.

And it’s actually been that way for some time. Tesco’s wood-framed store in Wick is now a couple of years old and wind turbines outside shops have become commonplace ever since Sainsbury’s unveiled one of the first at its Millennium store in Greenwich at the beginning of the decade.

It is, of course, quite easy to sit back and wonder whether the amount of energy consumed and carbon produced in the creation of a wind turbine will ever by fully compensated for by the additional energy produced by the machine. Equally, when building new stores, retailers will frequently indulge in a little carbon offsetting, something that is pretty hard to tie down.

But there are still two relatively simple questions that can be asked as regards all of this. How can we prove that offsetting makes a difference and does it really matter anyway? The answer to the first is pretty difficult and it does rather depend on who you talk to, but anybody who says no to the latter needs to do some serious thinking.

The only query that is likely to be asked of retailers in future is not whether they are indulging in greenwash, but why they have not done enough. For retailers, designers and shopfitters, the time is fast approaching when greenwash will be old hat for no better reason than that every retail organisation will be as green as they can be.

Evidence of this is clear from the production this week of a document from M&S entitled How we do business – a 100-point iteration of eco-progress to date. M&S may be in the green vanguard, but others are following.