The Food & Drink Innovation Network

The issues of carbon footprints and carbon labelling are becoming a key factor in the future of the food industry. In recent years consumers have become increasingly concerned about the impact that their purchases can have on the environment and the phrase ‘food miles’ now seems to be on the lips of most food retailers and consumers alike.

A recent Ipsos MORI poll has highlighted the increasing importance of the carbon footprint in the public’s conscience. Research shows that 19 per cent of those surveyed now consider the environment and pollution to be among the most important issues facing Britain today – demonstrating that interest in the environment is now at its highest among UK citizens for more than a decade.

However, it may not be as simple as slapping carbon labels onto all products across the board. At the recent Carbon Footprinting Versus Carbon Labelling seminar held by the Food and Drink Innovation Network, a poll of delegates at the end of the event revealed that many people now consider carbon labelling to be more of a problem than a help. As many as 35 per cent of those who responded to the poll concluded that consumer facing carbon labelling schemes will be harmful to the aims of sustainability in the long-run.

This is the view that has been supported and promoted by Sustainability Commissioner, Professor Alan Knight OBE, who has been explaining the important distinction that needs to be made between carbon labelling and carbon footprinting. He has been worried about the potential impact of carbon labelling schemes because while knowing the embedded carbon of products can be a good thing, he points out that there are lessons to be learned from other approaches and argues that labelling should not be seen as the solution in itself.

Commenting on the results of the FDIN poll, what surprised Alan the most was the extent to which people saw consumer facing carbon labelling schemes as potentially harmful. He suggested it should be considered something of a wake-up call to those advocating carbon labelling, such as the Carbon Trust. He argues that the industry as a whole needs to be “more elegant” and “more nimble” in the way it uses carbon footprinting, as well as being sceptical of putting the information we have on carbon footprints into the public domain via labelling initiatives.

While detailing the importance of carbon on products may be one important marketing tool, there currently remains much debate over how retailers and companies can best provide the information on carbon footprints to consumers in an accurate and easy-to-understand format. Alan makes the distinction between teabags and a patio heater, explaining that the heater will, in 30 minutes, have emitted the same amount of carbon as 200 teabags. But putting the same labelling information on both the heater and a box of teabags would make little sense because, while the teabags may always emit roughly the same amount of carbon in the boiling of the kettle, it is impossible to know how much a patio heater will emit because different heaters are used for different amounts of time. “Labelling helps, but there are some obvious choices that need editing out,” Alan explains in his Retail Week article.

But Euan Murray, strategy manager at the Carbon Trust, is emphatic that carbon labelling is a good idea. He says the Carbon Trust has been “bowled over by the demand” from companies wanting to work with it since launching its labelling initiative with Walkers and Innocent. Over 150 firms have contacted the trust over the scheme and Euan believes carbon labelling can be as flexible as it needs to be and can encourage the whole supply chain to cut its emissions. “For example,” he explains, “crisps’ carbon footprint is everything from diesel used by the farmer to the making of the packaging. A real mix of things can be used [to reduce food's carbon footprint].”

Walker’s Crisps, Boots and Innocent are all taking part in the Carbon Trust’s pilot scheme for measuring carbon content. Euan points out that this development has certainly been consumer-led, with research suggesting that two-thirds of consumers want to know the carbon footprint of the products they are buying, while 60 per cent are eager to buy low-carbon products.

That’s all very well, but it could be argued that simply because consumers are demanding something does not mean it is necessarily the best approach. Alan Knight argues that businesses and public policy are the influences that drive change far more than consumer demands. He also asks the question: “Are we using the tool of footprinting in the best possible way?”

Alan fears that the growth of labelling might obscure the big issues for some products and could distract attention from the use of better tools, such as choice editing. He points out that, during the 1990s, retailers argued that there was no need to provide ‘green’ options because consumers had not been demanding them. However, choice editing has demonstrated that, in fact, consumers have come to expect retailers to only offer them the greener options and therefore business, rather than consumers, can be the main catalysts in driving this change. Indeed, the argument is that too much choice had previously been the problem and editing down this choice, offering consumers the greenest options, can push forward the carbon debate away from simple carbon labelling.

The concern is that the public could be hoodwinked by carbon labelling because it is hard to know where the carbon footprint begins and ends. Take a bag of crisps. While it may be easy to see the beginning – when the farmer plants the crops in the ground – it is much harder to know what should be taken into account along the way. Should the person operating the packaging machine’s carbon footprint be taken into the equation, for example? While most would suggest that would be going a step too far, it could be argued that omitting this gives a false impression of the amount of carbon used throughout the manufacturing process. And where should a carbon label stop? To return to teabags, the amount of carbon used at the point of sale would be the obvious amount to be put on a label, but that surely gives shoppers a false impression of their own carbon footprint, because no-one expects the teabag not to be placed in boiling water.

The Department of Environment, Transport and Rural Affairs (Defra) is keen to develop one single method that will be able to measure greenhouse gases produced in all products. In conjunction with the Carbon Trust and BSI British Standards, the government department is working on the development of one standard method that can be used to measure carbon emissions created in the formation of a product. The three organisations seem confident that one standard measure can be developed, but as yet none of the organisations involved seem to have found a solution to the problem. While the Carbon Trust’s pilot scheme continues, the question remains as to what lies beyond that should the concept prove to be inadequate.

Clearly these issues need some serious consideration and will have to be resolved before the concept of carbon labelling can become a uniform way of measuring our carbon footprint accurately and reliably. But the Carbon Trust for one is in no doubt that labelling can prove to be a handy tool in tackling climate change by reducing harmful emissions. In the long-term, the trust’s Euan Murray believes that the use of carbon labelling will help to regulate all parts of the supply chain, as lower carbon products will prove to be more successful with consumers and therefore more profitable for businesses. Reducing emissions will become intertwined with reacting to consumer demand and maintaining a strong position in the marketplace, with consumers themselves effectively being the “policemen” of the system.

But Alan Knight would argue that it should be companies, not individuals, that are the custodians of improving food’s carbon footprint. And the results of the FDIN’s own poll following the October seminar suggests that Euan’s point of view may not be held by many in the industry. The importance of carbon labelling seems to be somewhat overblown and Alan Knight’s approach is that each product needs to have its own tailored approach to tackling and reducing carbon emissions in its production. A one-size-fits-all concept may be appealing because it can offer a simple guide for consumers, but it might over-simplify matters to the detriment of some perfectly eco-friendly products. Monitoring and tracking carbon emissions is a complicated business and attempts to oversimplify the process may simply have the effect of causing harm to the environment, rather than benefiting it. Alan believes that the results of the FDIN poll suggest that the Carbon Trust and other bodies may need to fundamentally overhaul their current approach, because of the potential opposition from retailers to the labelling initiative.