The science of calculating the carbon footprint of any given retail product is tricky at best and downright guesswork at worse. That isn’t stopping UK retailing giant Tesco from trying to do just that for every product it sells. All 70,000 of them, from shoes to shampoo, parsley to plastic wrap. Business Week wrote about this in their story called Carbon Confusion leaving readers to decide whether or not this was a good idea.
From a marketing standpoint, this is another great example of Tesco rewriting the rules for retailers. They have been innovators for a number of years and undoubtedly are scaring the pants of the folks in Bentonville especially as they look to expand in the US. Tesco decided to add carbon labeling because their customers asked for it. Simple as that. Most of the time if you give your customers what they want they’ll keep coming back.
In this case, the added service of carbon labeling was not without its complications. Noodle maker Unilever noted that “our supply chain is constantly changing” making it difficult to calculate the carbon footprint of each spaghetti package. As Business Week reports:
The idea was that the solitary numbers on the labels would make it easy for shoppers to compare products. In fact, each number represents a bewildering maze of “inputs,” such as how much fertilizer must be produced and spread to grow a bunch of parsley, how much gasoline is used to transport it from the farm, and the electricity required to make the plastic packages.
Regardless of the exactness of the labels, I believe this effort is good business and ultimately good for the world. It calls attention to simple issues like where products are made, how far they were shipped, how they are made and how they are packaged. Heightened consciousness will force manufacturers to think about these things as much as cost per package since competitive advantage may now be gained on the green factor. Though many manufacturers complained about Tesco’s efforts, others have used it to identify “hot spots” where energy is wasted, not a dumb idea when oil is exceeding a $100 a barrel.
As for the risks of inaccuracy, I think consumers will take all this information with a grain of salt. If their favorite brand is a few grams less efficient, my guess is their allegiance will remain. However, if the differential between two otherwise equivalent brands is huge, then expect the less energy efficient brand to lose out. Is this a bad thing? Do we really need to drink water flown in from Fiji when a local source is just as good?