Can eco-ratings on food and drink packaging help improve sustainability?

Since 2013, it’s been easy for shop­pers to see the fat, sug­ar and salt con­tent of the foods and drinks they’re buy­ing, thanks to the so-called traf­fic-light sys­tem of nutri­tion­al labelling on its pack­ag­ing. But assess­ing a product’s envi­ron­men­tal foot­print is far trick­i­er. You’d need to trawl through the provider’s web­site, deci­pher abstract data and hope that the infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed isn’t a load of green­wash.

But that could be about to change, cour­tesy of a new envi­ron­men­tal labelling sys­tem that’s about to be pilot­ed by Foun­da­tion Earth, an inde­pen­dent not-for-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion. The scheme has the back­ing of notable retail­ers and brands, includ­ing Sainsbury’s, Co-op Food, Nestlé and Green­core.

Using a method devel­oped by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford and Mon­dra, an envi­ron­men­tal infor­ma­tion plat­form, prod­ucts will be rat­ed accord­ing to their farm­ing, pro­cess­ing, pack­ag­ing and trans­port foot­prints. Their impacts will be weight­ed 49% to car­bon emis­sions and 17% each to bio­di­ver­si­ty loss, water con­sump­tion and pol­lu­tion. Their scores will be expressed using traf­fic-light colour code and an over­all grade run­ning from A+ down to G, in a sim­i­lar style to the ener­gy-rat­ing labels used on white goods.

Foun­da­tion Earth is aim­ing to imple­ment the sys­tem ful­ly next year if the pilot goes to plan.

Will customers care?

More than half of con­sumers sur­veyed by Mintel in 16 coun­tries in July agreed that there’s still time to save the plan­et from a calami­tous tem­per­a­ture increase – and that their own actions can make a dif­fer­ence in this respect. Almost half of the respon­dents want­ed prod­ucts to include envi­ron­men­tal impact labelling.

Morten Toft Bech is the founder of veg­an food pro­duc­er Meat­less Farm, anoth­er part­ner in Foun­da­tion Earth’s nascent labelling scheme. He expects that the pub­lic response to the ini­tia­tive will be over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive. 

“Con­sumers want trans­paren­cy and there needs to be a shift in how we approach sus­tain­abil­i­ty. That will come only with sup­port from brands, gov­ern­ments and con­sumers,” Toft Bech says. “It’s nev­er been more impor­tant to review our envi­ron­men­tal impact and reflect on it. We must lead food towards a more sus­tain­able future.”

Some busi­ness­es have already start­ed tri­alling their own envi­ron­men­tal labelling sys­tems. They include plant-based milk brand Oat­ly and Ten­z­ing Nat­ur­al Ener­gy, which this year became the first UK drinks com­pa­ny to intro­duce car­bon labelling on its cans.

Work­ing with cli­mate impact researchers at Car­bon Cloud, Ten­z­ing put its whole sup­ply chain under the micro­scope to work out the total car­bon foot­print of the busi­ness. This exer­cise was “almost shock­ing in its detail”, says Emi­ly Gan­der, head of com­mu­ni­ca­tions and sus­tain­abil­i­ty at the com­pa­ny, which is a cer­ti­fied B Cor­po­ra­tion. 

“It extend­ed to the degree of ask­ing: ‘How big is the boat that car­ries those ingre­di­ents from one coun­try to anoth­er?’” she says. “Hav­ing iden­ti­fied our foot­print, we want­ed to be entire­ly trans­par­ent with our com­mu­ni­ty about it.”

One of the biggest poten­tial ben­e­fits of eco-labelling is that it encour­ages brands to reduce their impact in this way. Ten­z­ing has switched pro­duc­tion from the Nether­lands to the UK, pre­vent­ing the emis­sion of 28.5 tonnes of CO₂ a year. 

“It’s def­i­nite­ly not the cheap­est way to do things, but it is the most sus­tain­able,” says Gan­der, who thinks eco-labelling will stim­u­late a gen­uine shift in con­sumer behav­iour. This would in turn encour­age big­ger brands to make pos­i­tive changes, she adds, even though it’s hard­er for multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions such as Coca-Cola and Pep­si­Co to “shift their old process­es and mind­sets to pri­ori­tise plan­et over prof­it”.

Robust accounting 

For eco-labelling to be tru­ly ben­e­fi­cial, the mea­sur­ing sys­tem needs to be rig­or­ous and stan­dard­ised. Com­pared with the nutri­tion­al scor­ing sys­tem, which has “pro­ce­dures that have been per­fect­ed for more than 100 years and could be test­ed by some­one at home”, this is not easy to achieve. So says Dr Luca Pan­zone, senior lec­tur­er in con­sumer behav­iour at New­cas­tle University’s School of Nat­ur­al and Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ences.

When it comes to assess­ing a product’s car­bon foot­print, “we aren’t even close to stan­dard­i­s­a­tion. It’s extreme­ly com­pli­cat­ed – every­one has their own method,” he observes. “A per­son in New­cas­tle might do it dif­fer­ent­ly from some­one in Aberdeen, say, and get total­ly dif­fer­ent num­bers.”

This is why the well-backed scheme pro­posed by Foun­da­tion Earth looks like a step in the right direc­tion, although its progress is unlike­ly to be smooth, accord­ing to Toft Bech. 

He acknowl­edges that “cre­at­ing a sys­tem that is fair­ly stan­dard­ised, clear and infor­ma­tive is a big chal­lenge. There may be some con­fu­sion at the start, as man­u­fac­tur­ers get to grips with the process­es and con­sumers get used to the labelling. I think there’ll be an edu­ca­tion job to do.”

Tesco tri­alled car­bon labelling as long ago as 2008 but dropped the scheme in 2012. At the time, the com­pa­ny blamed its deci­sion on the fact that it took sev­er­al months’ work to cal­cu­late each product’s foot­print accu­rate­ly – and the fact that no oth­er big retail­ers had fol­lowed its lead.

Pan­zone sug­gests that it’s pos­si­ble that eco-labelling could have an impact on com­pe­ti­tion that could prove unde­sir­able for the big play­ers – ini­tial­ly, at least. If a supermarket’s own brand of milk, for instance, turns out to have a low­er envi­ron­men­tal rat­ing than that of anoth­er milk brand it stocks, that could cause it to lose sales. If con­sumers change their shop­ping habits accord­ing­ly, that’s pre­cise­ly how such a sys­tem could be effec­tive in com­pelling super­mar­kets to improve the envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance of their prod­ucts. 

“The car­bon foot­print of an item is not writ­ten in stone like its calorif­ic con­tent, so this could stim­u­late a push to reduce prod­ucts’ car­bon emis­sions,” Pan­zone says.

He adds that eco-labelling should go hand in hand with oth­er changes in both super­mar­kets and online stores to encour­age green­er pur­chas­ing behav­iour.

“The prob­lem with envi­ron­men­tal mes­sag­ing on prod­ucts is that it reach­es only those peo­ple who care,” Pan­zone explains. “But, if you change the lay­out of a store, you can reduce your car­bon foot­print a lot faster with­out peo­ple even real­is­ing. You can do this by mov­ing less envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly prod­ucts away from eye lev­el on the shelves, for instance. Online, you can pre-sort items to dri­ve people’s atten­tion towards low­er-car­bon options.”

The gov­ern­ment could also help the sit­u­a­tion by intro­duc­ing a tax on items accord­ing to the size of their car­bon foot­prints, he argues. “There is still so much dis­so­ci­a­tion between con­sump­tion and envi­ron­men­tal impact, as peo­ple are not direct­ly affect­ed by their pur­chase of, say, a £1 plas­tic toy from Chi­na.” 

With such a tax, con­sumers would still have choice, but at least the gov­ern­ment would have mon­ey to help fix the envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems caused by the most car­bon-inten­sive con­sum­ables.