News

The news that Tesco is putting its considerable weight behind the Carbon Trust’s draft standard for carbon footprinting has given another major boost to the scheme.

The UK’s largest retailer will use the standard, which is being developed in conjunction with BSI British Standards and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to measure the embodied carbon emissions of 30 of its own-brand products. It joins some of the country’s biggest brand owners, including Boots and Coca-Cola, in signing up to the standard.

But although the support of Tesco could act as a catalyst for other retailers to follow suit, there are concerns from the packaging industry that the scheme does not go far enough and pays too much attention to packaging compared with other carbon contributors.

The Carbon Trust’s carbon reduction label displays the amount in grammes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases used in a product’s supply chain. But Jane Bickerstaffe, director of the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment, while agreeing that we need to understand carbon emissions better, says the value of simplifying it in a single figure on a product pack is “debatable”.

“The calculations on the carbon label should take into account the whole supply chain, including what the consumer does with the product once they take it home. It’s over-simplistic to give consumers one statistic for what is a very complex issue,” she says.

Proper assessment
Packaging Federation chief executive Dick Searle also thinks consumer usage should be included in the carbon footprint because “consumers cannot make any proper assessment of a product without it.”

While he applauds the Carbon Trust for developing a unified standard to measure carbon emissions – “any other approach would be a nightmare” – Searle believes proper consultation with the packaging industry is needed so that every sector, from glass to metals and plastics, is comfortable with the scientific rigour of the process.

On 1 October, BSI launched a month-long technical consultation phase with ‘select stakeholders’ to provide comments on the proposed standard. A wider consultation is set to run in February and March 2008.

The Carbon Trust launched its carbon reduction label last March with selected products from Boots, Walkers and Innocent. In September, nine more companies, including Cadbury Schweppes, Coca-Cola and Scottish & Newcastle, signed up to the scheme. It hopes to extend the label to around 20 firms by the end of the year.

Walkers chief executive Neil Campbell says: “The more people that get involved, the more we can refine the process and help consumers understand how their purchasing decisions can impact on the environment.”

The carbon footprint of a standard packet of Walkers Cheese & Onion Crisps was calculated by looking at the energy consumed directly in each of the key stages in the supply chain, converting this into the resulting amount of carbon emissions, and adding up the carbon emissions from each stage.

Packaging accounted for 15% of the total emissions, compared with 44% for raw materials, 30% for manufacturing, 9% for distribution and 2% for disposal of empty packs.

Boots’ sustainable development manager for products, Andrew Jenkins, believes the strength of the label is that it educates consumers on carbon footprinting and overall sustainability.

“Consumers understand that lots of small changes can make a big difference. They are more savvy than people give them credit for,” he says.

However, Jenkins also believes that at each stage of the lifecycle, all environmental impacts, including biodiversity, energy, resource use, waste and ethics, should be considered.

Carbon Trust carbon footprinting manager Euan Murray says the second phase of the consultation will analyse  emissions during consumption.

“The emissions in use were excluded from the carbon label pilots because it was felt that they were highly variable depending on the user. For example, the carbon emitted when using shampoo varies according to how hot or cold a person’s shower is,” he says.

The Carbon Trust says the aim of the scheme is to create a single standard that will enable a consistent and comparable approach to measuring emissions from products and services across their lifecycle.

Procter & Gamble is looking at the issue from a different angle (see below) and says its Future Friendly symbol complements, rather than competes with, the carbon label.

Bickerstaffe thinks P&G’s symbol is much more realistic than the carbon label because it explains to consumers that they need to look at their use of materials, energy and water.

“Looking at all the impacts, everywhere, and not making it complicated is the answer,” she says.

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FUTURE FRIENDLY
¦    Procter & Gamble’s Future Friendly scheme is not a carbon label, but a symbol that is meant to demonstrate that a product will help consumers behave in a more sustainable way
¦    The company is using it initially on four brands – Ariel, Fairy, Flash and Lenor
¦    P&G says the scheme recognises and responds to a key finding from full lifecycle analysis – that the largest component of energy consumption is that by the consumer using the product
More on the carbon label from www.carbontrust.co.uk
 More on Future Friendly from
www.futurefriendly.co.uk