Beginning in April, some food packaging in the UK will have a carbon-footprint label, informing consumers as to "how many grammes of carbon dioxide were emitted during production, from sourcing raw materials, to manufacturing and transporting the products to stores." This program, run by The Carbon Trust, forces companies who use the label to sign a “reduce it or lose it” agreement -- reduce your carbon footprint or lose the label.
My first question is: Will this work? Will seeing the carbon-footprint of a label effect a consumer’s decision to buy or not buy a product? Would it effect my decision? This program could effect UK businesses in a few ways (if the program actually takes off), the first being corporate competition. Rather than the success of a company being measured in its market share or profit, these companies will be held to a higher standard. Not only must they be profitable, they must be environmentally aware and their products must be environmentally safe. But in my opinion, the potential for this to go bad, for big companies to cheat their way around the system, is big. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I don’t foresee many companies subjecting themselves to additional tests and cost simply to “do their part” for the environment.
From BBC:
"A standard pack of Walkers Cheese & Onion Crisps, the brands bestseller and first to carry the logo, weighs in at 75 grams of CO2, whereas a bottle of Boots Organics shampoo clocks up 148 grams. However, an Innocent smoothie is not so innocent in its running up of a miniature carbon footprint of 294 grams."
By changing the way it makes its potato chips, Walkers could save up to 9,200 tons of carbon dioxide emissions and £1.2 per year, but what are the chances of the average person making a difference in their own carbon footprint? For instance, according to www.carboncalculator.com, the average household's carbon dioxide emissions from Energy use (in the UK) is approximately 400kg per year. So why does it matter that making a bottle of shampoo emits 148 grams of carbon dioxide? And if the bottle of shampoo is already made, what does it matter if I buy it or not? Answering these questions is much like answering this one in the United States: "why should I vote when my one vote will clearly not make a difference?" When the average household emits 400kg of carbon dioxide per year, reducing it, and reducing my own carbon footprint seems an arduous task. This one program, with these small labels, might actually have a greater effect than we could ever anticipate. It is a more realistic goal to reduce my carbon footprint by 100 grams, one bottle of shampoo at a time, than it is to reduce my entire households (or apartments) carbon dioxide emissions for a whole year.
The Carbon Trust is not the first to implement this program of labeling products. Timberland has already begun providing information regarding the energy used and labor hours spent making a product. I think this is actually pretty cool, especially that they display the number of labor hours that went into a product. In 2008 Wal-Mart Stores will have suppliers fill out scorecards on the environmental sustainability of their products and buyers will have the chance to view those scorecards.
And this is when I wonder – couldn’t they be doing more?? (At Wal-Mart, well yes, they could always do more. I’ll refrain from predicting the (non)effect of their “scorecards.”) Specifically, could The Carbon Trust be utilizing our ever-advancing technologies to make an even bigger impact? Research Shows that “66 percent of customers say they want to know the carbon footprint of the products they buy.” This may be the case in the UK, but what about the US? Simply adding a label to foods will not work here in the United States – just take a look at the statistics for obesity, yet there is a nutritional label on every item of packaged food. It isn’t that people aren’t aware of the ingredients, it’s that most just do not care. So why not marry the implementation of a label with some kind of existing and cool technology? I’ll steal an idea from my colleague -- The Carbon Trust could, for example, create a tool that allows customers to scan barcode's with their camera phones of products that are not labeled. There are programs out there to log our calorie intake per week or month – why not create a carbon footprint program to log total carbon dioxide emissions from food or other products? This would not only allow someone to look up the carbon footprint of a product, but also easily log and calculate their carbon footprint for food each month.
Don’t get me wrong, I commend The Carbon Trust (and the companies who have signed on) for their dedication to our environment and for their hard work in creating increased awareness of our impact on our environment. But I work at a place where the use of emerging technologies is what we do, it is the air we breathe, and I just don’t see The Carbon Trust taking advantage of those same tools we use here every day.
