First M&S, now Tesco goes green
Another UK supermarket chain, Tesco, plans to carbon-label the products it sells, according to a report in the FT. This plan moves beyond the recent announcement of chain Marks and Spencer to seek carbon-neutrality in operations, and ups the ante considerably. Who would have thought that climate change action would be driven by competition between supermarkets?! Of course, Tesco’s efforts may turn out to be a case of spin prevailing over substance, since the main carbon impact of most UK grocery shopping is likely to be the consumer’s car journey to and from the supermarket.
“Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s chief executive, said in a speech at the environmental charity Forum for the Future last night: “The market is ready. Customers tell us they want our help to do more in the fight against climate change. We have to make sustainability a significant, mainstream driver of consumption.”
Green issues have become a hot topic for retailers in the past year as they seek to win over the growing legions of shoppers expressing concern over the environment.
Environmentalists have mooted the idea of “carbon labelling” but companies have struggled because of the complexity of measuring the carbon required to produce each item.
The “carbon footprint” of a product includes the energy required for its manufacture, packaging and transport to the supermarket shelves.
There are no well-established methods for collecting such information, and some of the decisions over what emissions to include are likely to be controversial.
Tesco will invest £5m inacademic research on these methods, working with the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.
Sir Terry said he could not say when the labels would be ready but he hoped other retailers would label their goods so that a “carbon calorie-counting” system would become an accepted part of food packaging, in a similar way to nutritional information.
He said: “The idea is that you can compare the carbon footprint of a product as you would compare nutrition or price.” “
Carbon Consortium said:
By far the most important comment in the Tesco CEO announcement on Friday was the one referring to product labelling - the Carbon Calorie - a universal system!
Choose your product CO2 emissions along with your saturated fat levels and sugar intake.
The ‘cop-out’ of course is the sheer difficulty in an accurate assessment - excuse me Mr Cadbury can you let us know how much energy and hence CO2 emissions is used to produce a packet of Cadbury’s fingures compared with how much is used to produce your chocolate animal biscuits.
Some factories have one gas and electricity meter! Please just how much room will there be for prevarication, argument and method checking. It’ll just never happen!
What’s needed is a generic approach - chocolate biscuits - 25 grams weight - 50 grams of CO2 associate with their production (including downstream sugar, fat etc), 4 grams of CO2 for the packaging, 30 grams of CO2 to get it to the Tesco shop and 30 grams (yes 30 grams!) associated with selling it!
So transport, packaging and selling generates more CO2 than the production process itself.
Now there’s a thought for Tesco and the rest of them.
Other products - other emissions liabilites. Wouldn’t you just know that home grown meat, veg and dairy products have the lowest CO2 emissions.