Carbon labels can help consumers make more informed choices

Shoe pioneers Allbirds recently became the first fashion brand to slap a carbon label on its sole, bringing new meaning to the term measuring your carbon footprint. According to Forbes, “From now on, everything that the brand makes will include a number representing the CO2 emitted to create it–7.6 kg CO2e being the average for Allbirds footwear.” 

If my husband had a dollar for every time I mention that I wish all products had carbon labels, he’d be a billionaire. I talk about carbon labels ad-nauseum because I think they’re one of the most effective ways to help us make better decisions. If I like two sandwich offerings but one has a much higher carbon cost, I’ll choose the less intensive one. Newish research says I’m not alone. A recent study published in Nature Climate Change says that consumers tend to significantly underestimate the environmental impacts of different foods. 

After initial efforts to popularize carbon labelling in the early aughts didn’t take hold, carbon labelling seems to be having a resurgence. UK Food producer Quorn has announced that they’ll begin carbon labelling their thirty best-selling products this year. Even Nestle is reportedly considering carbon labelling. Whether these producers are doing it to reduce their footprint or just to appease customer demand for transparency and accountability is almost beside the point. The proof is in the labelling.

Carbon Trust carbon labels

While the process of measurement and certification for carbon labelling is no doubt complex for manufacturers, trying to make decisions about what to buy with limited knowledge of a company’s supply chain and stewardship is an impossible task for consumers. There’s no way to accurately make choices about a product without knowing a whole lot more information than is currently available, never mind being able to maintain this knowledge across the thousands of products we encounter in our lives. Uniform food labels clearly tell us what’s in a product, helping us decide whether to purchase it or not. It’s obvious that carbon labelling is where we need to go to understand the full cost of our purchases.

The difficulty of figuring out how to accurately measure for carbon has caused friction when it comes to implementing a universal labelling scheme, but the current Covid crisis has made us realize that we can expediently tackle complex challenges when the world demands. In a Wired article, Carbon Trust’s John Newton also says the data has gotten much better than it was when carbon labelling was first attempted a dozen years ago, with companies now reporting CO2 emissions all along their supply chains.

A Quorn carbon label

And if carbon labels for food and household goods can come close to the efficacy of consumer behaviour when it comes to energy appliance ratings, we’ll be able to choose environmental products much more effectively. The idea is not to guilt people for picking steak over tofu, but to help us begin to understand the full scope of our consumption so that we can make the best decisions with the fullest information.

Do you think about carbon emissions when purchasing food, clothes, or household goods? Would you like to see widespread carbon labelling? Let us know.

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