Tesco Adds Carbon Footprint to Product Labels

By GreenBiz Staff

Published April 29, 2008

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Tags: Marketing, Marketing & Communication, More... Marketing, Marketing & Communication, Measuring, Reporting, & Verification, PR

LONDON, United Kingdom — Supermarket chain Tesco has labeled 20 products with information related to each product's greenhouse gas emissions in a trial of carbon labeling.

Each item is labeled with a number showing the greenhouse gas emissions per serving, Reuters reported. The test items include orange juice, potatoes, laundry detergent and light bulbs.

The company has chosen to label only a few of the tens of thousands of items it carries because of the complexity of measuring a product's entire carbon footprint, Reuters reported. Tesco also hopes to receive consumer feedback while measuring the emissions of other products.

The labels show orange juice from concentrate has a lower carbon footprint than non-concentrate, and liquid detergent has less of an impact than powder detergent, the Daily Mail reported.

The government-funded Carbon Trust provided emissions figures based on commissioned and published research. None of the items in the pilot labeling program were shipped by air.

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