Earth Equity News

Carbon Labeling: A Useful Tool for Consumers? By Eric Marx, CSMonitor, November 10, 2008. "In Britain, carbon footprinting -- used initially to broadly measure environmental impact across a company's entire operations -- is morphing into an eco-labeling tool. Earlier this year, the British supermarket chain Tesco [the world's fourth-largest retailer, with 3,729 stores] began labeling some of its 70,000 products to reflect the carbon released in the their production, transport, and consumption. The intent, said Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy, is to educate and empower consumers to make informed decisions about their purchases. But some observers question whether such labels are providing consumers with information that they neither want nor understand. This past April, Forum for the Future, a green think tank in London, issued a report on carbon labeling [Check-Out Carbon, PDF, 21 pp], noting the danger in providing information without context to consumers... As British consumers grapple with the new labels, retailers in the United States are taking a limited approach. Right now, 'incremental change' is as far as most US companies want to go, says Joel Makower, a sustainability consultant who is also cofounder and executive editor of Greener World Media, in Oakland, Calif. Most companies don't understand their full environmental impacts, he says. Those making efforts to examine their carbon footprints often do so without transparency -- essential to generating both customer support and supply-chain innovation... Since 2005 [Wall-Mart] the world's largest retailer has been attempting to embed sustainability into its corporate culture... [But their] senior vice president of sustainability, Matt Kistler, says that he doubted existing [carbon-labeling] methodologies and the Wal-Mart customer's ability to relate carbon with consumer merchandise... Patagonia... has a new Web-based effort called The Footprint Chronicles. By showing both the 'good' and 'bad' on the company's interactive website, a consumer can track a Wool 2 Crew sweater as it originates in New Zealand, travels to Malaysia for combing, then to Japan, where it's spun into yarn and knitted, then to California and Nevada for sewing and production. In all, that's 16,200 miles traveled."