TESCO PILOTS CARBON FOOTPRINTING SCHEME

Tesco, the UK-based global retailer, has introduced new carbon labels on 20 of its products under a new pilot scheme.

The scheme seeks to go beyond the simple 'food miles' concept by considering the carbon emissions during the full life cycle of selected goods.

The first 20 goods include Tesco's own-brand products in four different categories: orange juice, potatoes, washing detergent and light bulbs. The new labels express the greenhouse gases released over the lifecycle of the products in terms of grams of carbon much like the nutrition label provides the amount of sodium or fat in foods. They have been developed with the Carbon Trust -- a private company established by the UK government to help Britain move towards a low carbon economy -- the UK Environment Department and the British Standards Institute.

Introducing the new labels, Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, said "We want to give our customers the power to make informed green choices for their weekly shop, and enlist their help in working towards a revolution in green consumption."

Tom Delay, chief executive of the Carbon Trust, added that "There has been a significant groundswell of interest from consumers in the carbon impact of the products they buy. And the collective challenge for businesses is to get meaningful information to them at the right time and place so they can begin to make informed low carbon choices."

Complex process

Tesco announced in March 2007 that they intended to provide the carbon footprint of all their 70,000 products. Calculating the carbon footprint is complex and costly, however, and the current 20 labelled products are part of a pilot project. Tesco has said that more labels will appear in its supermarkets over the course of the year. The groundwork has been done for labelling tomatoes, for example, but tomatoes are currently not in season. The first 20 products that Tesco has labelled are not air freighted ones. The methodology in this area is particularly challenging.

Peter Melchett, Policy Director at the Soil Association -- the leading organic certifier in the UK -- welcomed the move by Tesco. He said, however, that since soil carbon had not been considered in the carbon footprinting exercise, the label did not rate organic products as positively as they deserved. "Overall, organic farming has a reduced carbon footprint as it stores carbon in the soil, as well as using less fossil fuel energy," he noted.

Some other commentators expressed scepticism with regard to the new labelling scheme. Lucy Yates of the National Consumers Council said 'carbon grams' did not ring a bell with most consumers -- at least not yet. Overall, the carbon-related information was complicated and added to an ever-expanding jungle of consumer information, she said. Paul Monaghan, head of ethics at the Co-operative group, a competitor of Tesco's, felt the burden of emissions reduction should not be placed on the customer. He said companies were better placed to take action to minimise the carbon footprint over the supply chain of the products they sell.

Beyond food miles

Retailers initially responded to consumer demands for information helping them to reduce their personal carbon footprints by labelling certain products as being air freighted, since airplane emissions are particularly high. Most bulk products are shipped by sea; fresh produce, however, needs to reach the consumer quickly and airfreight is the only option. This first experiment ended up hurting some of the poorest and most vulnerable countries in the world. These developing countries had managed to capture high-value niche markets in developed countries by air-freighting fresh produce during the northern winter. The stickers singled out just one part of the carbon footprint, namely transport, ignoring other parts of the process. Overall, the exporters operating in warmer climates often produced products with lower carbon emissions as compared to their counterparts in developed countries, which produce out-of-season vegetables in a highly mechanised fashion in greenhouses using large amounts of carbon-intensive fertilizer input.

The new carbon footprinting attempts to account for the full life cycle carbon, measuring the carbon emissions from the field to the plate by accounting for agricultural methods, processing, energy, soil, distribution and everything in between. As this calculation is based not only on miles travelled but rather on carbon emitted during the entire production process, it is less likely to discriminate against developing country exports they way food miles schemes have done.

ICTSD reporting; "Tesco and Carbon Trust join forces to drive forward carbon labelling," CARBON TRUST, 29 April 2008; "Tesco trials climate-change labels on groceries," REUTERS, 29 April 2008.