When you eat your lunch, do you ever wonder how many grams of greenhouse gases were emitted in the process of putting it on your plate? And how about that tee shirt you put on this morning?
There’s growing interest in trying to measure such emissions and share the information with consumers. So-called carbon emission labels attempt to determine the total emissions created during manufacturing, transporting, and disposing of a product.
“We think of carbon as the new calorie,” said Prakash Arunkundrum, head of global operations and sustainability at Logitech, the technology accessories manufacturer, which recently rolled out carbon labels on several products, including a gaming mouse and keyboard. “We want carbon to be that thing that you look at and you say, ‘Okay, am I going to really need this in my life today?’ ”
Logitech estimates that its wireless gaming mouse, for example, generates 7.84 kilograms (kg) of carbon emissions throughout its estimated two-year use period. That may be modest, but think of all the products you use. Manufacturing a Ford Focus Titanium costs about 8,000 kg CO2e, The Washington Post’s Jessica Wolfrom reported. That estimate came from Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University in the UK and an expert on carbon footprinting.
The world's first carbon label, the Carbon Reduction Label, was introduced in the UK in 2006 by the Carbon Trust. Some of the first products to feature these labels were Kingsmill bread, British Sugar, and Cemex cement. “Consumers are increasingly engaged on this... as a proxy, they’re looking for companies to show that they are aware of climate change and sustainability and they’re taking action on it,” Carbon Trust CEO Tom Delay told The Post.
One such company is Just Salad, which claims it was the first restaurant to produce a carbon-label menu. While there are tools that can calculate emissions for various agricultural and other products, the challenge for Just Salad was dialing in those measurements for each of the dozens of ingredients on its menu and then for each menu item, according to Sandra Noonan, the chief sustainability officer for the New York-based chain. She told Restaurant Business’s Joe Guszkowski that her company enlisted MBA students at New York University’s Stern School of Business to do some of that “heavy lifting.”
Due, in large part, to the complexity of the number-crunching, some environmentalists are skeptical of the corporate push toward consumer labels, Wolfram discovered. “Reliable data about carbon emissions consumed in the manufacturing process is scarce,” she wrote, “leaving companies to establish their own methodologies. Carbon labels also are not regulated and require consumers to translate relatively complex scientific terms like ‘carbon equivalents’ on the fly.”
Last year, Priscilla Tsai, founder of the beauty brand Cocokind, began working with a third party to calculate the carbon emissions of her products. She told The Post that the process was cumbersome and expensive, but she believes the labels have been well received by customers. The undertaking also prompted her to reconsider where the company obtains some of its ingredients. She does worry that the labels may confuse some people. “Most consumers don’t know how to read a carbon label yet,” she said. “We are putting out the education and we’re asking consumers to learn with us.”
Panera Bread teamed up with World Resources Institute (WRI) to devise an alternative, Wolfram reported. “The chain began tracking its carbon footprint in 2015, but was struggling to make these complex calculations digestible for customers, said Sara Burnett, Panera’s vice president of food values, sustainability and public relations. ‘We just kept asking ourselves a question like, how do I take this really complicated topic of climate change and literally bring it down to the plate level?’”
With WRI’s help, Panera created a label identifying which meals fall below a threshold of 5.38 kg of carbon emissions per lunch or dinner — a number that WRI says is needed to cut food-related emissions 25 percent by 2030, in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement. If the item falls below that level, it is labeled a “Cool Food Meal,” with a grinning green emoji.
Consumer awareness of his or her carbon footprint is a smart way to drive down carbon dioxide emissions. An even better way is to put an honest price on carbon. Encourage those who represent you on Capitol Hill to enact a carbon tax--this year.