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.