News

Cadbury Schweppes and Coca-Cola are among nine companies to commit themselves to measuring the carbon footprints of their products by signing up to the Carbon Trust's draft standard.

The companies will use the standard, which the Carbon Trust is developing with BSI British Standards and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), to calculate the carbon footprint of selected products, taking packaging and other factors into account. For example, Cadbury Schweppes will trial it on Dairy Milk bars.

The new signatories to the standard also include Kimberly-Clark, Scottish & Newcastle, Müller Dairy (UK), and the Co-op.

Climate change minister Joan Ruddock said there was a "real appetite" among businesses to understand and reduce the impact of their products on the environment.

The news comes a week after Procter and Gamble launched its own Future Friendly label designed to "promote sustainable living".

The Carbon Trust launched the carbon reduction label in March 2007, with selected Walkers, Boots and Innocent products, to calculate embodied emissions.

The label now features on all flavours of Walkers crisps and on point-of-sale materials for the Boots Botanics range of shampoos.

If the companies do not reduce emissions over a two-year period, they will remove the label from the products on which it appears.

Click here for more information on the Carbon Trust draft standard.