With great power comes great responsibility, and Tesco is the most powerful supermarket retailer in the UK. It holds a 31.2% share of the national grocery bill, and is increasingly a global power in the retail sector.
The responsibility that comes with that power became apparent earlier this year when Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy announced plans to carbon-label all the products on Tesco’s shelves.
“The idea is that you can compare the carbon footprint of a product as you would compare nutrition or price,” Sir Terry explained .
But within days of the announcement, it dawned on Sir Terry that getting hold of the information that would underpin the carbon-labelling revolution would not be as easy as popping down to one of his supermarkets for a pint of milk.
So Tesco has put its money where its mouth is and is sponsoring the Oxford University Centre for the Environment (www.eci.ox.ac.uk) to the tune of £5m to collate the information required to carbon-label the 70,000 products stocked in the typical Tesco store.
But as IWR has found, Tesco and Oxford University Centre for the Environment’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI) face an information challenge almost as large as the impact of climate change itself.
As the world – and business in particular – faces up to the dangers of climate change, it has discovered an enormous hole in the information landscape, which makes it much harder to develop solutions for the problems our planet faces.
Good for business
Carbon-friendly business practices are not a purely philanthropic exercise. Ultimately, they are about expanding the business. Sir Terry himself admits as much. He says that carbon-labelling the products on Tesco’s shelves is all about attracting to his stores shoppers who are increasingly environmentally conscious.
When Sir Terry announced the carbon-labelling initiative in a speech to sustainability charity Forum for the Future , he said that the labels would record the amount of carbon dioxide released during the production, transportation and even consumption of the products on Tesco’s shelves.
“The market is ready,” Sir Terry said. “Customers tell us they want our help to do more in the fight against climate change. We have to make sustainability a significant driver of consumption.”
To kick-start the process, Sir Terry used the same speech to pledge £5m to academic research into the methods of measuring carbon and producing a carbon label for its products.
But Sir Terry was also quick to warn consumers and environmentalists that he did not know how soon the carbon labels, dubbed “carbon calorie counters”, would appear in Tesco stores.
Still, Tesco’s initiative has been broadly welcomed by the green lobby.
“A carbon label will put the power in the hands of consumers to choose how they want to be green. It will empower us all to make informed choices and drive a market for low-carbon products,” said Tom Delay, chief executive of Carbon Trust (www.carbontrust.co.uk/), reacting to Sir Terry’s speech in January 2007.
Lorenzo Wood of non-profit group Energy Is Our Capital agrees. “I have confidence in the public’s will to do the right thing when they have clear, credible information on what the right thing is.”
Tesco is not the only major retailer looking to improve its green credentials. Food and clothing chain Marks & Spencer has announced, with much public fanfare and advertising, that it intends to become carbon-neutral.
Tesco stopped short of making this promise, but says it will halve the amount of energy its stores use by 2008, which should also have the effect of cutting its energy bills by £500m by 2012.
But Tesco is arguably taking the harder route by not only reducing its own dependency on carbon-generating practices and processes, but also helping its customers reduce their carbon output.
It was a revelation to both the retail and information industries that Sir Terry’s carbon-labelling scheme was keeping him “awake at night” because the information to produce the carbon labels just doesn’t exist.
“More and more, businesses are looking for ways to reduce their impact on the environment,” says Ian Pearson, the climate change and environment minister. “To help them achieve that, we need a reliable, consistent way to measure these impacts that businesses recognise, trust and understand.”
But although carbon footprint data is scanty, information does exist that proves consumers want carbon labelling.
Research from Ashridge Business School (www.ashridge.org.uk) shows that 69% of Tesco shoppers believe that climate change information on products is important.
“My job is to look at the emerging reality of climate change,” says Sir Terry. “I know it is going to change consumption and I have to be sure that I give the leadership for the business to position itself for a different consumer society.”
Tesco has already committed resources to reducing its impact on the environment. It has acquired a fleet of battery-powered delivery vans made by Modec in Coventry to carry out deliveries to Tesco.com customers. And a new Tesco store in Shrewsbury has been built using renewable timber and heating, and incorporating cooling systems that reduce the need for traditional power-hungry air conditioning systems.
Big questions
Oxford’s ECI was set up in 1991 to research environmental issues and teach environmental change management. Its strategy is to answer the big questions on how the environment is changing and how society can react through public policy, private enterprise and social initiatives. ECI has a focus on both global and regional environmental change. It also tries to bring together natural and social sciences to provide answers to these difficult questions. Its research is split across three areas: climate, energy and ecosystems.
“We have no set brief,” Rebecca White, ECI lead researcher explains. The reason for this is that the scope of the research is so all-encompassing. And that creates a massive set of information complexities for the researchers.
“With foodstuffs it is so dependent on where you do the study and when,” White says of issues such as seasons and nations. And once the food has been produced, there are still difficulties. “No two supply chains are the same,” White adds.
Unlike medical research, the starting point for this research is not where your traditional expert would expect to begin, with journals and databases. White thinks that data held by Tesco’s suppliers may be some of the most valuable information reserves with which ECI researchers can begin their task. “Of course, there may be difficulties because of companies not wishing to reveal information that gives them a competitive advantage,” she concedes.
The last time any serious research into carbon usage was done was in 1973 during the oil crisis, when many oil producing countries embargoed exports to the US and jacked up the price of crude, resulting in long queues at the petrol pumps and much higher prices. Although the research carried out then was for a very different purpose, White believes it could be of use. Scandinavia has also done some significant research into energy usage and packaging which is expected to be useful.
Label standards
Industry nearly always leads and government follows. In the wake of the Tesco carbon-labelling announcement, the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that, in association with the Carbon Trust, it was enlisting the help of the British Standards Institute (BSI) to develop a set method of measuring embodied greenhouse gases emissions in products and services.
Pearson says: “The aim of the work is to develop an agreed method for measuring embodied greenhouse gases emissions which can be applied across a wide range of product and service categories and their supply chains to enable companies to measure the greenhouse gas-related impacts of their products and reduce them.”
BSI is to develop a specification and will use Carbon Trust methodologies (see IWR May 2007) as a starting point.
“There is a real appetite among business to tackle the indirect emissions from their supply chains and to offer clear information to consumers on the carbon impact of their products and services,” says Carbon Trust chief executive Tom Delay about how the information could be used for carbon labelling.
ECI’s White believes that to measure carbon emissions for food, carbon labels will have to go right back to the beginning – the fields where it is grown. Everything from the amount of ploughing a farmer does to the fertiliser they use will have to be measured and somehow applied to the new labels.
“With other foods, you also have to consider capital goods,” she says. “These can include greenhouses and how you heat them.”
For processed foods, the carbon used in the processing will have to be measured, and then there is the issue of how much oil is used to create the plastic which wraps a product before it goes on the supermarket shelf.
Along the way, carbon labelling will have to cross the debate lines of excessive packaging and food miles.
On the issue of food miles and carbon labelling, White reveals that measuring carbon pollution caused by aircraft is complex, because of where an aircraft deposits its carbon, high up in the sky.
“Aircraft carbon impact is very different to the carbon impact that takes place at ground level,” White says. The damage caused by coal-fired power stations and cars, for example, can be more serious.
She adds that the food miles debate is not entirely about environmental issues either, but also about supporting local economies. Yet since Tesco announced its plans to carbon-label products, consumers have been constantly reminded that tomatoes grown in Spain in unheated greenhouses and then trucked to the UK may have a lighter carbon footprint than those grown in the UK in heated greenhouses.
Information professionals in the British agricultural sector may want to look for information resources that highlight the benefits of supporting national agriculture as well as the environment.
Sir Terry and his Oxford researchers may publicly state that the information required to create a carbon label doesn’t exist, but the true picture, according to experts that IWR has talked to, is that there is not a single source. Instead, the required information is fractured and scattered as parts of other research findings. One expert told IWR that it was a golden opportunity for the information community to mine its data and pull out and recategorise information to suit the needs of this burgeoning new research area. It is in essence a new database just waiting to be populated and searched.
Behavioural mismatch
White has the resources of Oxford University Library Services at hand, but she warns academic libraries that they will need to keep up with the growing demands of researchers.
Labelling a product is one thing, consumer behaviour is very different. Despite all the publicity about the damage that carbon is doing to the planet, there is little or no sign of any reduction in car usage, and sales of sports utility vehicles (SUV) are still strong despite their heavy fuel usage and high taxation.
“Are there people who understand it and do they know what carbon is?” White asks, because this will affect how effective the label is. Oxford believes that once the research is completed and carbon labelling hits the shelves there will have to be a large-scale discussion involving consumers on what the labels mean, but also issues such as surplus goods and how consumers can reduce carbon output themselves.
It is unlikely that the national diet will become less carbon-intensive, especially since the UK’s multiculturalism has pushed the curry into the nation’s number one meal spot along with demand for year-round fresh fruit and veg. Our diet and consumption will therefore continue to have a carbon footprint and alternatives to flying and powering ships are a long way off.
But by beginning this research, and at least making some effort with its vans and shops, Tesco is lowering the overall size of its carbon footprint as an organisation. The rise of organic foods is in a small way reducing the carbon footprint by requiring less fertiliser, and it will be interesting to see what new methods arise from this research. What is clear is that an entirely new source of information will arise just as nano-technology information poured forth as new research avenues were opened.
