Carbon measurement and
carbon footprinting of products
Customer interest in the climate impact of
different food choices has grown so much in the
past year, as a small but growing number of
customers want to enable consumers to make
better-informed dining choices, as well as
reducing their own Scope 3 emissions. At the
time of writing, only a small number of
manufacturers provide emissions data on their
products (e.g. Quorn. Oatly and Impossible are
three examples) and in the retail sector, there are
small signs of progress but no standardised
approach. It took years to get to a mandatory
nutritional label, and nutritional data is arguably
easier to settle on than environmental, especially
beyond greenhouse gas emissions.
In its Farm to Fork strategy, the European
Commission committed to producing a
"sustainable food labelling framework to
empower consumers to make sustainable food
choices" by 2024, but a mandatory
environmental label in the UK isn't on the current
government's to-do list. The British Retail
Consortium meanwhile is working on the
provision of "climate information" as part of its
climate action roadmap, but lack of data is
hampering progress. [1]
Leading change in foodservice
Given that it's unrealistic for companies to
conduct product level lifecycle assessments
(LCAs), there are a range of generic greenhouse
gas emission (GHG) data tables in the public
domain that act as a guide for responsible
dining choices. These are useful indicators,
using best currently available data, but there is
room for improvement in that they apply
different metrics, they don't reflect seasonal
variations (they are just averages) and also they
don't reflect the efforts of individual suppliers to
cut the GHG emissions in their production
processes and supply chain; they can end up
'demonising' certain commodities. Different
GHG tables give huge variances in the GHG
footprint for the same commodities. An example
which excludes beef can be seen below: