Paging Earth is a climate communications blog dedicated to demystifying, depolarizing, and educating the public about climate activism and climate science. Now that we’ve discussed the nuances of the climate crisis, let’s talk about viable solutions.
Carbon dioxide levels today are higher than at any point in the past 800,000 years. The only way to reduce our carbon dioxide levels is to reduce our corporate and individual carbon footprints. Individuals should try to be conscious of the impacts of their choices on the planet and reduce their carbon footprint, although feeling guilty about living your life without constantly prioritizing the most planet-friendly choices is difficult, mainly due to the lack of transparency companies provide consumers when they are trying to find environmentally friendly options.
Communicating carbon
Most options for reducing carbon emissions are not communicated to consumers efficiently. Many Americans are still very ill-informed about climate change topics, including carbon emissions. Some people have even given up on mitigating their own carbon emissions because presiding companies seem as though they can’t be stopped.
One idea to mitigate these emissions, while also providing communicating their impacts to consumers is a process called carbon labeling. Carbon labeling is a method of packaging that reveals the amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, and other greenhouse gases emitted during the production, distribution, use, and disposal of a product.
Labeling products directly provides a comparison of the amount of carbon used in order to make mindful shopping decisions. This information is important to consumers that wish to minimize their ecological footprint and contribution to global warming made by their purchases. One can only do that with clear climate communications from company to consumer.
How does carbon labeling work?
There are many different types of carbon labeling that could be put into the distribution of all products making it a standard for consumer goods. But what would pervasive carbon labeling look like, and how would this become the new normal?
Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and three groups of fluorinated gases [sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and perfluorocarbons (PFCs)] are all very harmful to our environment. Carbon dioxide — which represents about 82% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the US — is the most common.
A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) that are generated by our actions. The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons, one of the highest rates in the world.
Carbon footprinting and emissions accounting are two ways that organizations and companies can track and account for their carbon emissions. For some organizations, reporting their carbon footprint is a mandatory requirement, but publishing them to the public is not. It is fairly standard practice at large corporations and is usually handled by a specialist consultancy.
Certification of a product’s carbon footprint consists of a carbon life cycle assessment (LCA) of the product in accordance with internationally recognized standards. Carbon footprints are usually measured in terms of an annual sum that takes into account the impact of all the company’s key activities over the course of a calendar year; however, it’s increasingly common for manufacturing companies to communicate their footprint on a per-product basis. This means that the actual impacts of the product being bought are communicated directly to the consumer.
Although these environmental impacts are being recorded, it is rare that they are being disclosed to the consumers. Instead, it has become more common for consumer-oriented sustainability to include greenwashing as a term becoming the antithesis of social and environmental responsibility. Greenwashing is a marketing tool used to deceive consumers into believing a product or brand is environmentally friendly by outwardly showing signs of environmental responsibility that, when examined, is a tactic to increase profits or boost brand image.
Simply adding a recyclable label onto a package, is not true sustainability and communicates the wrong message to customers. To eliminate the false spectacle of environmentalism, including a transparent point of view to the customers of what is really going on behind closed doors is important to communicate to customers. The use of Carbon labels portrays the full picture.
Is carbon labeling feasible?
Carbon labeling is supported by a majority of shoppers. Two-thirds of consumers support carbon labeling on products, according to a new international survey of over 10,000 consumers across the US and Western Europe. Another majority of consumers also noted that they are also more likely to think positively about a brand that could demonstrate it had lowered the carbon footprint of its products.
Calculating the carbon footprint of seemingly basic foods such as apples and potatoes is a non-trivial task. Different assumptions about production, transportation, and the carbon footprint of fuels used may result in wildly different estimates. Consumer post-purchase choices — the way a potato is cooked, how intensively a device is used, the source of electricity for a device, or whether material is recycled — can also change the carbon impact significantly.
When shopping for a product in the grocery store, does it ever cross your mind how environmentally friendly the products you are picking out are?
On your weekly shopping haul, you could have a variety of products on your shopping list such as clothes, cleaning products, laundry detergents, meat and produce for dinner, as well as bread and snacks for lunch.
As you pick out these items for your household the carbon emissions add up. Making the decisions of more environmentally-conscious products more pertinent.
Carbon labeling could make environmentally conscious decisions extremely easy. Just as you look at the price of the product label on the packaging, the carbon emissions could be easily labeled on the packaging as well. These carbon emission “scores” on packaging communicate the amount of carbon the product has taken in total including production, distribution, use, and disposal of a product.
Carbon labeling marketing
We often hear about the wrongdoing of individuals’ actions but rarely by big companies. But today, with a more socially conscious society, companies need to be held to a higher standard for the overall health of our planet.
The more consumers become interested in the communication of carbon emissions, the more we will see companies transition to this as a marketing plan. It not only rewards the companies who are environmentally conscious, it also encourages others to follow.
Companies may differ from the transparency of their emissions due to the lack of environmentalist efforts put in place, but for some, it may encourage them to put in place a strict carbon reduction plan. The idea of these labels maintains the social responsibility that some corporations may lack for the benefit of society at large.
As the use of corporate responsibility expands, it is becoming increasingly important to have a socially conscious image. Consumers, employees, and stakeholders prioritize corporate social responsibility when choosing a brand or company. By doing this they are holding corporations accountable for enacting social change with their business beliefs, practices, and profits.
Consumers should be afforded the choice to make genuinely comparable choices while shopping. But in order for this to happen, the adoption of carbon labeling at the critical mass level must be implemented. Small changes to packaging could alleviate the global climate crisis as we all become more educated and informed about the consequences of our shopping decisions.
