Carbon’s vital statistics

A tiny label is provoking some serious number crunching in the food and drink industry – from the top of the supply chain right down to its roots.

It is the ultimate in corporate transparency – a bold black logo on every standard-sized packet of Walkers crisps, stating how many grammes of carbon dioxide are produced during its life cycle. “We total up the emissions from the farmer ploughing the field, from the factory that makes the aluminium for the packaging, from the manufacturing that turns the potatoes into crisps,” says Euan Murray of the Carbon Trust, which helped Walkers calculate the footprint of its cheese-and-onion crisps last March. “In July we rolled out the label across all our flavours,” says Steve John, head of corporate communications at PepsiCo, Walkers’ parent company. “That’s 550 million opportunities for customers to see it over 12 months.”

For every 34.5g packet, Walkers discharges 75g of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Is that good - or bad? The short answer is, the numbers themselves aren’t really the main point. You’re not trying to compare crisps with, say strawberries from Egypt. “The label also features a big downward arrow,” John explains, “and that carries a clear message to consumers. One, we’ve measured and understood the footprint of this pack; two, we are committed to reducing it.” Companies that fail to reduce, forfeit the right to use the label. “The flip side is that companies bringing that number down will get public recognition,” says Murray.

Though it sounds like marketing flim-flam, the label is underpinned by rigorous science. “What we’ve done is pull together bits of research in different areas into something over-arching,” says Murray. As well as carbon, the label takes into account methane (which, over 100 years, has 23 times the impact on climate change of CO2) and nitrous oxide. These are converted into ‘carbon equivalents’ using a formula agreed by scientists under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “It’s very robust,” Murray insists, “but is something businesses can apply to a huge range of products quickly and cheaply, rather than it being a detailed academic exercise.”

In the case of Walkers, it helped them see that transport – the bête noire of green campaigners – accounted for only 9% of emissions. A staggering 44% was generated by the growing of raw materials: potatoes, sunflowers, seasonings. In particular, Walkers learned that storing potatoes in humid conditions to keep their skins soft raised their water content – and a huge amount of heat was needed to dry them out prior to frying, pushing up energy use. “Potatoes are 80% water and 20% solids,” says Steve John. “We now pay farmers a bonus based on dry-matter content – and we’re looking, with our suppliers, at varieties of potato that require less water.”

One consequence of the Carbon Trust’s scrutiny is that Walkers has reduced its water usage by 45%. Such savings, coupled with the PR advantage of being seen to be doing something about climate change, have focused minds in a wasteful industry. “Since we launched, we’ve had expressions of interest from more than 120 companies who want to measure the footprint of their products and help us test the label,” says Murray. “A third have been from the food and drink sector.”

Counting the carbs Cadbury has completed two studies with the Carbon Trust, looking at the footprint of its Dairy Milk bar and a Green & Black’s product. As a result, it is focusing its reduction strategy on key manufacturing areas and is upgrading boiler houses, making more efficient use of air conditioning, and experimenting with solar power and biogas (from sugar cane) in factories abroad.

However, the company has stopped short of putting a carbon label on packaging. “We haven’t reached a decision on that yet,” says David Croft, global director of ethical sourcing. He points to the practical difficulties of setting in stone a product’s emissions – especially for a large company. “If you’re producing a million Creme Eggs a week, you want your packaging as standardised as possible,” says Croft. “If an ingredient changes, it can’t be. A simple, hypothetical example is sugar beet from Norfolk; our supplier might start to take sugar from France, so the label will be inaccurate.”

He also wonders whether the public is ready for it. “Consumers have very little idea of what 75g of carbon means on a packet of crisps. We’d rather provide more thoughtful information – and the web is a better medium.” Jessica Sansom, sustainability manager at Innocent, which has also done a Carbon Trust audit on one of its smoothies, agrees: “On its own, the label means nothing.” The company has published the calculation on its website rather than try and confuse customers by cramming it onto a carton “already crowded with environmental messages”.

Besides, she says, a label that simply quantifies grammes of carbon per pack could be misleading. “Our smoothie’s footprint was 293g,” says Sansom. “Does that mean we’re not as good as Walkers crisps at 75g? Is it to do with weight? People would instantly assume we were worse.”

Perhaps, at this stage, brands and retailers should keep it simple, suggests Sally Uren, director of Forum for the Future’s Business Programme. “They’re the ones who should be doing the hard work, and then communicating to the consumer that issues such as climate change are being taken care of.” She thinks the message might come across more clearly through a graded or ‘traffic light’ system, helping shoppers compare products. And she’s encouraged by the consultation process under way – led by the Carbon Trust, the British Standards Institute and Defra – to develop a Publicly Available Specification (in other words, a standard we all recognise and understand) over the next 12 to 18 months [see ‘Footprints on the farm']. “We need to avoid retailers taking different paths. The last thing the already confused consumer needs is to have to work out whether Sainsbury’s carbon is better than Tesco’s carbon.”

It may be a while before shoppers are exposed to labels on supermarket goods. Tesco made a high-profile announcement in January that it would put one on each of its 70,000 products. But it will not be drawn on a timescale. “Getting the methodology right is key,” says Trevor Datson, Tesco’s environment spokesman, “and the important thing is to take serious steps down this road.” Nick Monger-Godfrey, head of corporate social responsibility at Waitrose, which has been measuring and publicly reporting its carbon footprint since 1999, also has “reservations about whether a consumer-facing carbon label is economically viable or meaningful for consumers”. So does Callton Young, director of sustainability and competitiveness at the Food and Drink Federation (FDF).

The primary goal, says Young, should be to reduce CO2 emissions across the food supply chain. How that is achieved is secondary. If the goal is wholeheartedly embraced all along the food chain, then there’s much less of a case for encouraging consumer leverage over the industry via product labelling.

Encouragingly, says Young, government data already shows that the UK food and drink manufacturing sector as a whole reduced its CO2 emissions by 15% between 1990 and 2005. FDF members are continuing to make significant carbon cuts under their voluntary Climate Change Agreement with Defra, says Young, and are developing ideas for doing more. Reporting CO2 emissions at sector, trade and even company level could go a long way towards informing consumers about CO2 levels and, more importantly. trends in the food and drink industry. Of course, the manufacturers are part of a bigger picture – Defra has estimated that they account for only 11% of the food chain’s greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why Young stresses the importance of the food chain as a whole working together towards a low carbon future – and strongly supports the work being done by the British Standards Institute, the Carbon Trust and Defra to develop a single methodology for measuring greenhouse gas emissions for both food and non-food products.

Jeanette Longfield of Sustain has another concern about carbon labelling – the whole question of whether its remit is simply too narrow. “There’s all the other stuff about sustainable development,” she says, “like biodiversity, fair trade, human health and animal welfare.”

The exercise may have focused PepsiCo’s operations on CO2 reductions, rather than biodiversity for example, but there’s no doubt that it has been a catalyst for change. “All our decisions now – about sourcing, transport, packaging, disposal – are looked at through the lens of greenhouse gases,” says Steve John.

If these labels were on everything from a loaf of bread to a pint of milk, it would no doubt at least sensitise manufacturers, if not their customers too, to the ‘carbon cost’ of food production. Which is only a few steps away from a world of farm gate carbon prices that actually reward the best-adapted players in the game…

Andrew Purvis is principal investigative writer on food issues for The Observer Food Monthly.

11 October 2007

Andrew Purvis