A confusing guide to greener eating
Elisabeth Jeffries
There’s a modern myth that food miles are bad. But measuring the carbon footprints of food items produces surprising results. We discover, for example, that bringing New Zealand lamb to our table — according to information collated by Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute — can generate fewer emissions than if the Sunday joint originated in Wales, due to higher emissions from UK feed and rearing methods. And it’s not cool to buy roses from Dutch hothouses. We should fly them in from Kenya, where they grow in the sun.
Now Defra, the Carbon Trust and the (independent) British Standards Institute have jointly published a ‘fasttrack product carbon footprint standard’ called PAS 2050 to help legitimise product footprint development and encourage its use. They have set out the terms under which companies can have their products’ footprints measured and approved. The aim is to assure shoppers worried about global warming that the footprint means what it says on the tin — allowing them to choose products with smaller footprints.
But the footprint concept is too simplistic to be really useful. It seeks to record emissions released during the production, distribution and consumption of the product, and the disposal of packaging and food waste. But how can a retailer know whether shoppers use products in any prescribed way? How many retailers work only with suppliers whose production methods and energy use are clearly defined? How can those suppliers track the renewable element of the energy they use? They can’t, so the standard has to rely on averages to calculate electricity emissions for any given product.
Like a real footprint, a carbon footprint can be quickly washed away. Supermarkets sell many fast-moving items, which are themselves dependent on fast-moving commodities markets overseas — where middlemen obscure the origin of produce from a variety of sources.
Dairy farmers and potato growers rarely know who ultimately buys their produce. To develop a reliable footprint measure, a central agency would need to collect data from the thousands of market participants; difficult enough in the UK, let alone in India or the Far East. Suppliers in different countries may measure energy use in different ways, making data inconsistent. According to Marks & Spencer, which has refrained from using product carbon footprints thus far: ‘Carbon labelling is both complex and expensive.’ If other retailers have found it affordable, that is because they have applied it to very few products. Twenty-two companies have been involved in carbon-footprint development on items such as Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bar, some Boots shampoos and Sainsbury’s milk. Shoppers in Tesco can find footprints on certain kinds of orange juice, potatoes, light bulbs and detergents — and the company says more are on the way.
But the limits are obvious, given the millions of transactions that occur every day worldwide. For a narrow range of easily tracked products, the carbon footprint will become a ‘green quality’ label, adding value and allowing retailers to mark up prices for products with authenticated smaller footprints. That might be the case where the retailer buys vegetables direct from a market gardener who has invested in particularly well-insulated greenhouses. To consumers passionate about these issues, higher prices might be well justified.
But one small segment of the grocery trade is hardly going to drive down global greenhouse gas emissions. To do that, the carbon-footprint system needs to be commonplace, like nutritional labelling, allowing shoppers to compare like with like. At around the same time it was working on declaring the carbon footprint of Dairy Milk, Cadbury was also launching a new chocolate bar called Twisted with the same gooey content as a Creme Egg, but using more energy and more packaging — and silent as to its footprint. Retailers and food producers thrive on product diversification to remain competitive. Unless footprints are measured across entire product ranges — with all the extra costs that implies for retailers and suppliers — they will be no more than a marketing conceit in the guise of a public information campaign: a mission for business as usual.
The truth is that the establishment of international systems for carbon pricing and trading offer a better way to address the issue of greenhouse gases than leaving it to supermarkets and their customers. And it would make more sense for government to offer shoppers a broad education on these issues, rather than this simplistic but potentially misleading footprint code: to teach them, for example, that the most carbon-emitting food groups are meat and dairy products followed by fats and oils, bottled and canned soft drinks, bread and cakes; and that more emissions are generated in the use of electrical appliances such as irons after you buy them than in shipping them from China.
Meanwhile, companies will continue to fly in products from afar — which is one reason why Britain wants new airport runways.
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