Just a thought... It would be nice if consumer goods bore "carbon footprint" labels, stating how much carbon dioxide (and equivalent gases) were released into the atmosphere to produce them. It would also be great if federal/state/local governments and all corporations were required to report "carbon footprint" scorecards, listing their net carbon dioxide emissions. (Carbon offsets could be included in corporate scorecards, but should of course be excluded from product labels.)
Mandating such labels and scorecards might change consumer purchasing habits but hopefully they would encourage producers to change their processes. Labels and scorecards would also force standardization of the processes by which the carbon footprint is measured, and would thus prepare the way for a "carbon tax" in the future, if such were required to achieve emissions reduction goals. Most important, labels would bring the issue into our everyday lives. (It might also have unexpected benefits, such as revealing just how environmentally friendly certain proclaimed "organic" food items truly are.)
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Carbon Footprint Labels
Posted by Dr. Strangelove at 4:56 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
18 comments:
There may be practical hurdles that would make it highly manipulable. Some organic foods, for example, could claim almost no carbon footprint, except for the fact that they were shipped from Chile, then trucked to Whole Foods in Kansas City. That labeling can't be put on at the factory. For foods, the biggest carbon usage is often in the shipping. Same with many other products. Local - not organic - is the real way to reduce carbon footprints.
Also, there is no way in hell the Chinese labels would be anywhere close to accurate, and that provides so much of the consumer goods.
Requiring stores to label shelves with where something came from could be a good start: most of the UK supermarkets now do this voluntarily (or at least started voluntarily, not sure if it's compulsory now), and a simple country of origin label could be extended to have a typical carbon footprint value of the travel from that country / region / state. Could have unforeseen downsides of course: Waitrose (most expensive/luxury nationwide supermarket in the UK) had a problem selling French apples at one point because everyone was buying British, even when the French ones got down to 9p a kilo (about $0.10 per lb).
I like Pombat's idea... Have a carbon footprint value plus also a country of origin--the "buy America" lobby over here might like the country of origin stamp. LTG is right that the labels might be inaccurate, as calorie counts can be. But I think it would be an interesting idea.
Would a buy local campaign work better in the US if items were labelled by state (just asking because it wouldn't so well in Aus)? Alternatively should we simply be trying to measure the amount of oil/coal used or say the amount of water?
I have a friend who does research on transportation and logistics. He says that the assumption that foods imported from overseas have a bigger carbon footprint than domestic ones is not that safe to make.
if, as Spotted Handfish points out, we start including how much water - especially irrigated water - is used, local foods might not be so attractive environmentally.
RbR and Spotted Handfish... I like the idea of labeling by US State as well as national origin. And that would make a difference here, I think.
Including the amount of water is interesting but, to me, less important only because what concerns me is global warming, not drought. (Not that drought is unimportant, but I am only concerned at the moment with water usage insofar as it impacts global warming... i.e. through the carbon footprint.)
So imagine a label that indicates country/state of origin and carbon footprint for production. Those two items could be stamped at the factory. The transportation carbon footprint would have to be added by the retailer at the last mile. Still, that's only three pieces of information--not too bad to give consumers MUCH more data about how their purchases could affect global warming. Much less than a dietary label, anyhow.
Well, let's take an artichoke being shipped to Iowa. It either comes from Salinas, California, or somewhere in Chile. Both have to be shipped from CA - but the Chilean one also has to be shipped overseas. So there's a bigger carbon print for the overseas 'choke on this score. The question is what sort of carbon goes into its creation. That is almost all about the fertilizer. Which is probably much the same.
Water, of course, contains no carbon. There may be environmentaly negative effects to using water, but not greenhouse-gas causing effects.
Of course water contains no carbon but irrigated water uses lots of power (through all the pumps and equipment) and that has a carbon footprint. Irrigation systems also involve other environmental concerns.
I guess the question is: would it be better to include carbon footprint labels on consumer goods that will be inaccurate or misleading in some cases than to include no carbon footprint information at all? While problems with labeling will cause other problems, on the whole labels would leave consumers better informed, which I think is a good thing.
I am glad LTG agrees with me that the purpose of these labels would be to warn consumers of global warming implications--not of environmental impact. That is a difference that often goes unappreciated. I feel that mitigating or preventing global warming is more important.
Generally more information on labels is always better.
Assuming we could get accurate carbon footprinting information I don't have a problem with it.
The problem is that labels aren't big enough to include all the environmental, genetic modification, consumer protection, country of origin information etc etc etc.
At some point we'll have to make choices about which products most need what kinds of information on their labels.
"At some point we'll have to make choices about which products most need what kinds of information on their labels."
Yup. And that's exactly the debate I was trying to start here. We should think hard about including carbon footprint information on consumer product labels. When considering what information to require on labels, I believe carbon footprint information deserves a high priority. It needs to be in our faces, or we will not see it.
OPEN QUESTION: What information should be on a cereal box? Assuming that the nutrition information HAS to be there, what else would you put there?
I admit I have not thought about this enough to really have an agenda on this one.
I work for an organisation in the UK that deals exclusively with environmental footprinting ...
From my point of view (as the resident agri expert) food miles has been widely dis-credited as a single effective measure of food sustainability ... agriculture contributes much more than just transport CO2 when looking at the whole life cycle (cradle to grave) and other greenhouse gases.
Seasonality and production methods are more important in most cases (except where air freight is involved perhaps). Take one example: apples eaten in the UK in april will have been refrigerated since harvest - e.g. 6 months? Buying local in this instance wouldn't be the green option: having a rhubarb crumble instead would be!
These kinds of 'hidden' emissions have been highlighted by a growing number of published life cycle studies that focus on global warming potential (GWP).
Of course this has implications for labelling food products ... the actual footprint of an apple will vary considerably with seasons (not to mention the fact that supply chains are so fluid). So how do retailers practically (and economically) address this - while still delivering the primary objective of labelling: to help the consumer buy lower carbon products. No one really has the answer to this yet (not that I've met anyway).
However these, and other, thorny issues will have to be addressed in the wake of the imminent publication of 'PAS2050' - a BSI standard on calculating life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of products and services (phew!).
Watch this space (and our blog!)...
Best wishes, Richard.
Very good to hear from an expert in the field. The organization referred to above is Best Foot Forward. (Besides, you have to admire any organization that appreciates the joys of rhubarb crumble. Yum.)
It is interesting that "seasonality" (eating foods soon after harvest, I think?) and "production methods" are often more important than transportation distance. That was a welcome surprise to me. It is unfortunate that there apparently is as yet no practical or economical way to label food products. (Although non-agricultural items might be more amenable to this sort of label?)
It is encouraging, however, that enterprises like Best Foot Forward exist and--while they appear currently to be concentrating on grading entire organizations--they are building the expertise required to start addressing more specific questions of individual products or product lines.
It strikes me a similar to the problem of assessing a Value Added Tax (VAT) or Goods and Services Tax (GST)--a sort of sales tax that grows with various steps of production instead of merely being being computed at the final mile in the supply chain. Which makes me think... If a "carbon tax" is implemented, I have no doubt the government will figure out how to collect it :-)
Cereal should have a crunchiness index.
I assume you are being cute, rather than trying to trivialize this.
Dr.S - seasonality is indeed all about eating the foods when they're in season. Easiest to do when you have a decent local market to go to: whatever foods are very plentiful and/or cheap tend to be the ones in season (well, vice versa really). Much harder in a supermarket where, for example, you can get strawberries all year around, for roughly the same price (and the same disappointing taste - they should taste like summer dammit!). Most decent foodie magazines will have advice on what's in season when, with the big bonuses being the cheapness and tastiness of the foods, as compared to out of season / forced grown varieties. Growing your own, 100% organic, would of course be the preferred option if possible.
I would like to see nutrition, some appropriate carbon footprint type, and a water usage label on foods, also a place of origin, and where appropriate, details on organic / free range etc (I don't care so much about organic, but buy free range, as a compromise position since I'm never going to give up meat, so the animals should be happy first). Being down here in Aus, where our drought is painfully obvious, I'm very aware of how precious a resource water is (I didn't take water usage as seriously when I lived in the UK - plenty of water there, grew up with a different mindset). Even when you live somewhere with a plentiful water source, there's no point using more than is necessary, as that water then has to be cleaned etc, all of which requires energy, not to mention various chemicals, and thus has a carbon footprint of its own.
I don't normally stand up for big corporations, but we need to make sure the labeling requirements are not onerous. Place of origin should be easy. Carbon footprint sounds much, much harder to calculate, and much less useful of a figure. Even the nutrition information is iffy to me. When I see a popsicle and it says a serving is 110 calories, but "servings per container: 2.5" I feel like screaming. It reminds me of a Jeffrey Steingarten comment about subsistence menu produced by the US government that called for a daily ration of "a little more than one egg." Every time I think of that I start convulsing in laughter. It's bad, really bad.
I also would be a bit leery of the premise of such labeling, which I take to mean that consumers should bear all the burden of choosing more ecologically sound products even if they cost more, while cheaper less eco-friendly products tempt from nearby shelves. Do you want to pay $1.50 for a loaf of bread made with diesel-fed grain or $5 for a loaf of locally-made bread? Can I take the cheaper one in a brown paper bag and sneak out of the store?
The market always makes such moral choices difficult. I joke at Trader Joe's with the 15 kinds of eggs to choose from that I need to "pick my level of cruelty for the day." I also know that even if I always buy the best eggs, this will have only a marginal effect on laying hens, because most probably will not pay 50%-100% more for the green label (it's like that).
If we want to improve matters, we should move toward regulation, not labeling. Then we can choose as a society how to allocate the cost, rather than placing all the burden on the consumer.
Post a Comment