Carbon footprint labels scheme

BBC News reports:

A labelling scheme that will show customers the size of a product's "carbon footprint" has been unveiled.

The initiative, operated by the Carbon Trust, will show shoppers how much carbon was emitted in the manufacture and transportation of the goods.

Participating companies also have to agree to cut the product's carbon footprint over a two-year period or face being thrown out of the scheme.

It will be interesting to see how detailed the label information is—and whether it breaks down shipping carbon costs into its inter- and (much larger) intra-national elements. (There's no indication that it will do so on the relevant Carbon Trust page here.)

On a related note, Jamais Cascio points out the need for carbon labels to not only show the carbon cost of the product but also a guideline "recommended" figure:

[N]ow the Carbon Trust, a UK non-profit that works with businesses to reduce their greenhouse impacts, has embarked on an effort to build a labeling standard for adoption across industries. (It should come as no surprise that I'm very much in favor of this sort of labeling!)

So let's say this works out, and soon every bag of crisps you buy has a little label on it showing how many grams of carbon resulted from that bag's production. Now you can compare it to other snacks, and try to eat only the goodies with smaller numbers in the label. But while that level of comparison is helpful, it doesn't offer the larger context necessary to make the comparison meaningful. You still don't know whether both the (e.g.) 100g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of crisps and the (e.g.) 50g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of carrots are outrageously high, ridiculously low, or vanishingly irrelevant.

Giving purchasers a more contextual sense of product carbon cost may actually be an area that is ripe for disintermediation of the retailers by social web services—if I could scan a product's barcode with my phone camera and then view it's carbon cost in relation to other equivalent products (via a web service), I could readily get a sense of its carbon cost in its relevant context.