I got a bit excited by a couple of articles, unfortunately not online, about CO2 labelling of consumer products. The first, in the Queensland Country Life, talked about the implications for Australian beef and other farm products of the announcement by the Japanese dating back to Hokkaido G8 summit last year:
About 30 companies will display their labeled items at an eco-products fair in Tokyo in December, and the first batches are expected to appear in shops at the beginning of April 2009.
The idea was to include the total carbon footprint from a life-cycle analysis. The scheme was to be based on a British scheme where the supermarket chain Tesco announced early in 2007 that they were going to carbon label up to 70,000 products sold in their stores. They found the business hard going and certainly by March 2008 they had labelled only one product, a packet of potato chips.
The Wiki entry mentions three as examples. If you go to The Carbon Trust, who are doing the analysis, and check out their product directory they seem to be further down the track. Here we learn, for example, that a T-shirt is worth 650g of CO2, a load of washing 700g and to keep a Halifax Bank web saver account 200g per annum.
But as triplepundit reported:
“Unilever, a top supplier of household products to Tesco, operates 260 factories in 70 countries and works with more than 10,000 subcontractors.”
Which would be changing constantly, as often as once a week, which Unilever says they just can’t keep up with.
According to Environmental Leader in August 2007 56% of UK consumers said the wanted such information and 44% said they would use it. Although it’s not quite the same thing this contrasts with an estimate by Marion Nestle of New York University that perhaps 8-10% of consumers are interested in ethical information about the production of food, according to an article from the New Scientist Barcodes could reveal your food’s credentials.
The QCL article cited above says the surveys in Japan indicate that up to 90% of consumers there are interested in carbon labelling but are not necessarily prepared to pay for it. They were also sceptical about the possibility of false labelling. Both those concerns seem well justified. Tesco alone is spending 100 million pounds a year on its sustainability program.
The UK scheme tries to overcome credibility issues by establishing an official
British Standard for such information. Another approach is to bypass this to some extent by establishing green brands, such as Eco-Beef, which, according to another Queensland Country Life article, had a “fairly low-key launch” in Japan last year by Nippon Meat Packers Australia, so low-key that it doesn’t yet appear on their website. Such brands are supported by Australia’s clean, green corporate-style advertising and backed up in the case of meat by MLA’s (Meat and Livestock Australia’s) National Livestock Identification System (NLIS), which traces individual animals from paddock to slaughter (I’m not sure whether it goes through to the shelf, I’ve heard that it does) and their MSA grading system which
is a beef and sheepmeat eating quality program that labels beef and sheepmeat with a guaranteed grade and recommended cooking method to identify eating quality according to consumer perceptions.
The international version is the EQA (Eating Quality Assured) program which starts from surveys of customer preference and behaviour and works back from there to product labelling.
It would be easy, I would think, to add carbon footprint information to such labelling and here Australia may have some advantage. Brad Teys of Teys Bros told the Senate Committee on Climate Policy that Australian beef cattle put on 60% more weight at the same age than cattle in Brazil through superior pastures and animal genetics.
This doesn’t necessarily translate into a 60% better carbon footprint. What’s involved in establishing the environmental impact of an industry such as dairying can be judged from this fascinating study of modern (2007) dairying in the USA compared with what most people would perceive as the more environmentally friendly industry of 1944:
Modern dairy practices require considerably fewer resources than dairying in 1944 with 21% of animals, 23% of feedstuffs, 35% of the water, and only 10% of the land required to produce the same 1 billion kg of milk. Waste outputs were similarly reduced, with modern dairy systems producing 24% of the manure, 43% of CH4, and 56% of N2O per billion kg of milk compared with equivalent milk from historical dairying. The carbon footprint per billion kilograms of milk produced in 2007 was 37% of equivalent milk production in 1944.
One of the key differences was that in 1944 pasture was the dominant forage source supplemented by grass hay, corn and soybean meal. In 2007 the dominant feed was corn and alfalfa silage. More of the feed goes into producing milk rather than maintaining the cow. Milk output per cow was an astonishing 4.4 times greater.
Of course this raises the sensitive issue of feedlots. Many consumers would wish to know whether what they eat is free range or feedlot and would avoid the latter like poison. Yet there are feedlots and feedlots and solutions between the two. The producers would be well-advised to start doing research on cow contentment, if they have not already, an index of which could be included on the product. It shouldn’t be too hard!
This raises a couple of issues. Consumers may want to know more than a ‘simple’ carbon footprint number. Also there is a need for information to be based on science rather than ideology. So-called “food miles” is an old chestnut.
This New Yorker article is 8,000 words, but a great read (for example the Swedes found that Christmas cost 650kg of CO2, the weight of 1000 Christmas puddings). It suggests that the food miles concept is simply junk. Did you know, for example, that lamb shipped from New Zealand to the UK has a quarter the carbon footprint of the lamb grown locally? Roses flown in from Kenya? One sixth of the carbon footprint of roses shipped in from Holland,mostly grown in hothouses. Yet Tesco is trying to limit the goods imported by air and plans to put an airplane sticker on those it does.
While the EU has decided on mandatory carbon footprint labelling I’m not sure how far down the track they are. The New Scientist article referred to above mentions several software systems being developed to potentially provide point-of-sale consumer information.
Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID chips to track their products. But with the help of cheap cellphone and internet access it is becoming possible to collate data from remote locations around the world and make it available to the people who are actually going to eat the food.
The main purpose of Barcelona firm FoodReg Technology is to work with Sime Darby, a large palm oil supplier in Indonesia and Malaysia, “to prove to customers that its crops are not grown on land recently occupied by tropical rainforest.”
TraceTracker is a Nowegian firm set up in 2000 in response to a series of food safety scandals is working on things like supply chain traceability and management as well as consumer information on “ingredients, product history, freshness, or environmental records of individual products or product lines” plus “advice, recipes, coupons, entertainment, health and wellness tips”.
An interesting aspect is that they are developing mobile phone technology for farmers to upload information onto their database as well as mobile phone access by the consumer at point of sale.
Mention was also made of a Fair Tracing Project which aims “to provide ethical background information about products” via the barcode.
All this sounds like an unstoppable movement. According to TraceTracker Chairman Knut Jörstad:
But that’s just the beginning, according to Jörstad. If the various initiatives start collecting their data in a standard format, all the different databases could be linked together in one huge “internet for food”.
Producers will worry about ‘capture’ of the new technology by green groups with agendas incompatible with the practicalities of their operations. And so, I think, they should.
I think it also calls into question the notion that I had been a bit partial to that growing local is best.
In principle I am in favour of carbon cost labelling. In practice, unless it is an actual cost to the consumer – for example, with some kind of carbon ration book – I don’t see it having any effect on consumption.
After all, we have had nutritional labelling for some decades, and yet we have more obese and yet malnourished people than ever before. It’s not lack of information which is preventing people from living a lower-carbon lifestyle. Broadly-speaking, people know what causes high emissions – lots of electricity use, lots of driving, lots of meat-eating.
What prevents a lower-carbon lifestyle in the West is not lack of information, but lack of decent alternatives, combined with our particular culture of conspicuous consumption.
An ecological idiot living in a small flat in the city five minutes’ walk or tram ride from work who enjoys swimming and so visits the pool on hot days will have a lower carbon footprint that an ecological genius living in the far outer suburbs who has to drive 45 minutes to work every day because there’s no public transport, and who can’t afford the higher rates for renewable energy from their retailer.
We need the alternatives. We don’t really need more labelling.
Thanks Brian, very interesting. Especially the carbon-miles/locally produced canard. Saw a news piece about this, regarding produce grown in Africa and sent to UK. Advertisers were claiming people should by local stuff to the detriment of African growers whose carbon foot print and price was substantially lower. This written article covers it somewhat,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6383687.stm
Oh fer Chrissake.
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This is why the whole cap n’ trade thing is, in my view, a crock. Look at this tangle of classificationary hairsplitting and technocratic surveillance.
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To be sure any means of dealing with carbon reduction is going to require some gauge of how much carbon is produced by this or that. But doesn’t this enormous apparatus that tries to make of carbon a simulacrum of money and then run a vast system of qualified and bargain intense regulation to reduce it make it so much worse?
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Whenever I look at one of these scams, sorry, schemes my brain reels. Which I think is the point. How the Hell are any of us supposed to know what is really being done?
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Last week one of the Rudd govt’s ‘initiatives’ plonked itself in a space on Swanston St. It was a big, shiny metal box thingy with large bits of green plastic trimming. Inside there was a bunch of hip, young people in Earthy clothes.
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The whole thing was gonna help the environment. Y’know how? Plonk a metal box next to Swanston St for a week, hire three or four people to sit in, if you get curious they’ll tell you they’re here to help. How do they help?
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They give you a pamphlet on saving water or something.
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Golf clap.
I don’t know what to do with all this stuff in a policy sense. The New Yorker pointed out that the rich are likely to pay to keep sinning.
Monbiot has that idea of a ration card for everyone, but looking at what is involved does make me wonder whether carbon footprint information can be accurate and reliable. Will altruistic retailers make a difference?
Monbiot has that idea of a ration card for everyone, but looking at what is involved does make me wonder whether carbon footprint information can be accurate and reliable.
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George Monbiot is a classic case of why the Left are so frequently good at pointing out problems and designing crap solutions. A ration card? Is he serious? Will this be a globally administered instrument? Who will administer it? And what about the fact that everyone will hate its guts.
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Will altruistic retailers make a difference?
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In business, alturism is suicide. In my view the thing is to make carbon production more expensive with a tax. That is the libertarian view (those willing to accept the need to do anything at all).
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I then say use that money to fund renewable energy projects. Definitely not the libertarian view. Solar power stations, cold fusion research etc. Make it desirable to use less energy and let the energy companies know that they’re in the same position as the city stables c. 1910.
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Alturism only get you so far. Selfishness goes right around the block.
Guh. More obsessive attempts at quantification. Not to be a negative nancy*, but I don’t see any way enough information about C movement could possibly be collected without spending more ‘C credit’ than the effort would save. The energy required to store the data alone makes the exercise ridiculously wasteful.
Even with that left aside, I don’t think our attempts will be anywhere near accurate enough to be useful at the level of specificity desired. These statements go for both monitoring C sequestration efforts and C expenditure; they are after all no more than two separate classes of flow pathway within the system (into and out of atmo).
I think this kind of problem is far better managed by some background knowledge and a series of general statements. Example: “Where production and transport methods don’t vary significantly by region, the closer region is the most efficient”; “where production methods in a region require a significantly higher input of energy relative to other regions, transport costs are likely to become insignificant to the sourcing decision”, etc.
*ok, I totally am.
On the environmental economics front:
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A large survey of economists looking at metrics other than GDP and taking into account various aspects of historical cycles and indicators of future air quality, soil erosion, resource depreciation, the likelihood of armed conflict and water scarcity have produced an in-depth special issue of The Economist with a clear vision of the future.
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There will be some exciting innovations in politics apparently.
The NZ/UK lamb situation isn’t that clear-cut – the study was sponsored by a NZ lamb business, and compared the lowest-impact farming in NZ with the highest-impact farming in the UK. And it ignores the other part of the eat-local idea, which is that you should eat seasonally as well. If you want lamb all year around, you’re going to have to either import it or freeze it. Or, you could go without it if it’s not lambing season.
Which supports the main point of the post, anyway. There’s a lot of people who’d benefit from a less than truthful carbon label, and it’s difficult to include every possible factor.
Yes, stringy, I suspect there is too much opportunity for bias, ideology and sectroral interest to intrude on what masquerades as objective information.
Does anyone else find the following sad, absurd, and hilarious?
the supermarket chain Tesco announced early in 2007 that they were going to carbon label up to 70,000 products sold in their stores. They found the business hard going and certainly by March 2008 they had labelled only one product, a packet of potato chips.
FFS! Banal quantification outreaching itself, and falling off a cliff of its own making. No wonder you sought refuge in the certainties of the Age-old Man/Woman Question, Brian
My take. Basically, I agree.
I believe that in Japan the consumer in the supermarket aisle can already via their mobile phone access information about a domestic piece of meat they wish to purchase. Such information as the life history of the individual animal & the farm it comes from in Japan. It was the case that a farmer in Japan is only raising a few animals; treatment including massage & beer, all of which must put the scale of cow contentment up pretty high. But of course a kg of domestic Wagyu costs a ridiculous amount of yen in comparison to the $/kg in Australia.
As a beef producer I can only see any carbon labelling as one almighty big headache. Hell I can’t get enough return to sustainably look after this land I belong to now let alone increasing the paperwork required for such a scheme. It’s like throwing a drowning person a lead weight to hang onto. Instead of sensibly looking at the problem & addressing it this country will document itself into oblivion. A poorly designed carbon trading scheme will only profit a small group of traders happily trading in what will become another commodity & who will have no interest in what the original problem may have been that this new trade was suppose to solve.
It’d be a bit like the labelling on cigarette packets here in Australia. They initially have an impact but then people become used to them and then ignore them. Mind you it would be good for school kids to do projects.
This is one of the reasons why putting a price on carbon works well, because all the carbon costs end up in the final price of the good or service sold without having to explicitly account for it all the way up the chain.
Robert, I can see that, but I get the impression that this movement has a momentum irrespective of that.
still@downfal @ 12, I believe the Japanese are worried that Australian beef, even Waygu, will be embarrassingly more environmentally friendly than the Japanese product.
yeah, the simple, effective thing to do is the statist response: tax the inputs, let the price signals sort em out.
Except of course agriculture remains exempt, third world remains exempt, imports remain exempt from most schemes proposed.
http://qcl.farmonline.com.au/news/state/livestock/news/meat-exporter-blazes-a-trail-with-eco-beef-label/1547375.aspx?storypage=0
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A link about the Nippon Meat Packers scheme.
o/t but wanted to ask Brian if that post on Christine Milne’s speech to the national press wotsit is still coming?
Next cab off the rank, myriad, and more than half done. The problem is that they promised us more rain today and the sun is shining.
It should be up by tomorrow am.
murph @ 17, that article you linked to was in the printed edition of 18 June. I looked for it, did searches and couldn’t find it because it wasn’t posted until 22 June.
The New Scientist article wasn’t online either until, by accident, I found it under a different title.
These things are meant to try us.
excellent, looking forward to it Brian – and yes, enjoy the sun!
Robert – This is one of the reasons why putting a price on carbon works well, because all the carbon costs end up in the final price of the good or service sold without having to explicitly account for it all the way up the chain.
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Hear hear.
Yes, but of itself we are then relying on the price to change behaviour and we’re assuming that other goods/services are available with a lesser carbon footprint. I’m in a bigger hurry. Leaving aside ruminants for a moment, there are three main sources of emissions – stationary power from fossil fuels, mobile power from fossil fuels and land use/tree clearing. I reckon we should attack two of those three directly with a program of replacing dirty power with clean power and paying the price as we go.
We are making it all too complicated with a program that we don’t know will work and which is is going to have to be disappear anyway, isn’t it, when we achieve zero emissions.
Brian your argument rests in the anxiety that comes of a loss of control. The trouble with cap n’ trade is that where there is control it is technocratic control that eludes most of us. If we make carbon production more expensive it stands to reason that most users of it will attempt to save costs and that in doing so will develop innovations that reduce such use.
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It will also provide funds for renewables research. And a market for the products.
Robert & Adrien 14 & 22, some clarification please. Am I wrong in my understanding that you are saying that whenever there is an output of carbon along a supply change for a goods or service, it is paid for & the cost passed on until this has an aggregate effect on the final price to a consumer. Sounds good in theory but for the full cost of carbon to end up in the final price of the goods or service there must be a mechanism for at each point in the supply chain where the cost of carbon can be passed on.
Off the top of my head I can’t name you anywhere in agriculture where any extra cost can be passed on, the buyer of an agriculture product determines the price. I know, in the short term agriculture is exempt from any carbon tax. But we will be impacted by the likes of trucking companies passing their extra costs onto us and we will not be paid any extra for produce ect.. A compounding effect for me will be beef abattoirs will be impacted by a price on carbon & will pay less for cattle.
If anyone has bothered to read what I have written in other threads they will be getting sick of the next bit. The current markets & economy has become uncoupled from basic natural systems. There is no room in the current market mechanisms that acknowledge the need for sustainability. An improved sustainable landscape will improve the natural carbon/ water cycle; this will then improve long-term food security & lessen carbon in the atmosphere.
there must be a mechanism for at each point in the supply chain where the cost of carbon can be passed on.
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A mechanism.
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The current markets & economy has become uncoupled from basic natural systems. There is no room in the current market mechanisms that acknowledge the need for sustainability.
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I agree. Various alternatives to GDP as a measure of economic health have been proposed to address this. Thus far no dice.
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I tend to support carbon tax because I see it working. I have no ideological preference either way. I don’t think it solves entire the problem of ecologically damaging externality however. But when it comes to methane and carbon dioxide it does put a price on at least two externalities and this is a start.
still@downfall,
the advantage ( I know this is a debateable point) for the beef producer is that they can always sell the product. I appreciate many costs will rise but productivity will have to rise to cover this.If low quality grazing land can’t return enough it will be better to rethink the enterprise.
You may not get much when you sell and that will drive the way capital is deployed. If there is no margin then producers will progressively leave the market.
On the demand side consumers will change their eating preferences and refocus on certain products . Others will be able to produce a niche product based on being able to have a debt free primary industry enetrprise.
This doesn’t address the more significant problem that there will be growing demand for food but I think beef consumption will become like a luxury product with commensurate pricing.
The main drift seems to be towards sustainable paddocks which are improved with all significant geological and riverine features protected by licence / work orders from the Department of Energy and Water ( NSW ).
Having attended a day discussing the native vegetation Act / river bank revegetation ( CMA ) and the role for National Parks I left in no doubt the legislative framework to put these ideas into effect already exits.
The various departments are using education to advance their agenda at this time.I think this will progressivley change in future and funding for projects will always be available for suitable projects but the areas needed to be given up are substantial.
Brian #15, I only did a scan over the QCL articles you referred to, noted that the little carbon labelling occurring wasn’t working too well, made the mental comment to myself, ‘not surprised & moved on with my reading. I’ve now handed the paper on, so I can’t quickly check it out. I have no facts at my fingertips on which confirm whether “Australian beef, even Waygu, will be embarrassingly more environmentally friendly than the Japanese product.” However I have the belief that given proper research that many will be surprised that Australian beef from rangeland grazing is more environmentally friendly than what they currently believe.
As to carbon labelling working, we aren’t doing too well with what we are trying to label now. I would like to ask the question how much does the average shopper understand what is currently plastered on their grocery items? There appears to be a great reluctance to have any intelligent straightforward way to communicate what country the product in a grocery item has originated from. The best labelling system I know is the MSA grading system as mention by Brian in the original posting.
I don’t believe that this product is to be found at the big supermarket chains but rather at the more traditional butcher shops.
murph the surf, need to think over your comment, will try to reply by tomorrow night.