Tesco's introduces 'carbon labels'

Just the other day--in my review of the weeks climate blog posts--i mentioned plans for
M&S to go carbon Neutral. Now Tesco has announced plans to label it's goods with there carbon footprint!

Quote bellow Via Carbonara:

“Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s chief executive, said in a speech at the environmental charity Forum for the Future last night: “The market is ready. Customers tell us they want our help to do more in the fight against climate change. We have to make sustainability a significant, mainstream driver of consumption.”

Green issues have become a hot topic for retailers in the past year as they seek to win over the growing legions of shoppers expressing concern over the environment.

Environmentalists have mooted the idea of “carbon labelling” but companies have struggled because of the complexity of measuring the carbon required to produce each item.

The “carbon footprint” of a product includes the energy required for its manufacture, packaging and transport to the supermarket shelves.

There are no well-established methods for collecting such information, and some of the decisions over what emissions to include are likely to be controversial.

Tesco will invest £5m inacademic research on these methods, working with the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.

Sir Terry said he could not say when the labels would be ready but he hoped other retailers would label their goods so that a “carbon calorie-counting” system would become an accepted part of food packaging, in a similar way to nutritional information.

He said: “The idea is that you can compare the carbon footprint of a product as you would compare nutrition or price.”

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