Give me a friggin break...
Remember those halcyon days when we knew nothing of trans fats in potato chips or the sugar count of our Cocoa Puffs? Now there's another issue to agonize over as you scour the back of the cereal box: carbon footprints.
Consumers in the U.K. are already eating carbon-quantified crisps, thanks to a new pilot project aimed at assessing the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of a grocery item, from raw material production and manufacturing through to distribution and disposal.
Walkers, a PepsiCo company, has since agreed to assign labels to all its chips, but the numbers won't mean much to consumers until more companies sign up for the program. As of late September, about a dozen more had joined the program, among them Cadbury Schweppes and Coca-Cola, which should give the project some legs.
The challenge, of course, is to develop standards that are meaningful�easy for the consumer to understand, rigorous enough to endure scrutiny and universal enough to apply to thousands of different products.
Here in North America, we've been slower to jump on the carbon bandwagon, even though a recent study shows that nearly 50% of consumers are willing to pay a 10% to 30% premium for food from supply chains that emit half as much greenhouse gas as conventional chains.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/article789756.ece
Remember those halcyon days when we knew nothing of trans fats in potato chips or the sugar count of our Cocoa Puffs? Now there's another issue to agonize over as you scour the back of the cereal box: carbon footprints.
Consumers in the U.K. are already eating carbon-quantified crisps, thanks to a new pilot project aimed at assessing the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of a grocery item, from raw material production and manufacturing through to distribution and disposal.
Walkers, a PepsiCo company, has since agreed to assign labels to all its chips, but the numbers won't mean much to consumers until more companies sign up for the program. As of late September, about a dozen more had joined the program, among them Cadbury Schweppes and Coca-Cola, which should give the project some legs.
The challenge, of course, is to develop standards that are meaningful�easy for the consumer to understand, rigorous enough to endure scrutiny and universal enough to apply to thousands of different products.
Here in North America, we've been slower to jump on the carbon bandwagon, even though a recent study shows that nearly 50% of consumers are willing to pay a 10% to 30% premium for food from supply chains that emit half as much greenhouse gas as conventional chains.
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