More companies are putting carbon labels on their products, but do they really make a difference?

Companies are divided over the usefulness of carbon footprint labels for their products. The labels give a measurement of the greenhouse gases emitted during the production and consumption of goods, and are increasingly visible in British shops. Carbon footprinting has some big-name backing, including Tesco, which now has the easily recognised footprint symbol on a range of its own-brand commodities, including the 30m litres of milk it sells each week.

The label has been developed by the Carbon Trust, the government-funded agency tasked with helping develop a low-carbon economy. The Carbon Trust says the label now appears on products worth £2.7bn in annual sales, and that more than 40% of consumers “are actively seeking information about the carbon impact of the products they buy”.

One adopter is Tate & Lyle. The company’s William Baldwin-Charles says the label is useful because it demonstrates to consumers the “very competitive carbon footprint” of the company’s sugar, even though the sugar cane comes from Caribbean or Pacific nations.

Producing a kilogram of Tate & Lyle sugar generates 380g of CO2, compared with the 500g produced by competitor Silver Spoon. The carbon footprinting concept, though relatively new, is “fairly well understood” by consumers, Baldwin-Charles says.

But others are less sure. Jessica Sansom of smoothie maker Innocent Drinks says the firm is “incredibly supportive” of carbon footprint work as a basis for reducing emissions and finding cost efficiencies. But the company decided not to go ahead with a footprint label on its products because “we didn’t feel the information really had a lot of context for our consumers”.

Sansom adds that the certification process is costly and complex, and “we would rather spend the budget on actual footprint reduction projects”.

Label confusion

The main concerns about carbon labels are that they add to the plethora of labels already confronting consumers, that they may overlap with other green labelling schemes and that they might be little understood.

So far, the footprint label has been applied mainly to grocery items, rather than high-energy-using products such as fridges or washing machines, which might seem more obvious candidates for labelling. However, appliances must already carry labels rating their energy efficiency, which overlap to a degree with a carbon label.

And Morphy Richards’ irons became the first household appliances to carry a carbon label in February this year. The Carbon Trust says the label has “made a mark on the electrical appliance industry”.

Confusingly, there are two types of carbon label. The first gives a carbon footprint amount such as 800g in the case of a litre of Tesco milk. But the second, used on Kingsmill bread, for example, simply states that the brand owner is reducing CO2 in partnership with the Carbon Trust.

The Carbon Trust accepts that the label has some problems. The Trust says that “displaying the number on-pack doesn’t work in every situation”, and “we’ve found that the carbon figure itself isn’t easily understood by consumers”. Where brands opt not to include a CO2 figure, they are obliged to provide full information on their websites, while the presence even of a numberless footprint is “a simple stamp of approval that consumers can look out for”.

Consumer groups, meanwhile, are reserving judgment. Natalie Hagan of Which? says: “It is a little too early to know if [carbon labelling] is of use to consumers. Currently it seems to lack a frame of reference.” But with businesses under pressure to use all means to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, carbon footprint labels are likely to be here to stay.