Best foot forward

Exactly what is carbon footprinting, and how useful is it? Article by Jane Burston, Founder Director of Carbon Retirement.  Carbon Retirement is a new ethical carbon offsetting company that uses funds from individuals and organisations to reduce industrial pollution in Europe.  See how it works by watching the animation at www.carbonretirement.com Increasingly, footprint logos are popping up on leaflets, TV ads and products.  They tell us to ‘act on CO2’ by measuring our carbon footprint, or communicate the grams of carbon emitted by a packet of crisps or carton of orange juice. A ‘carbon footprint’ is simply the emissions associated with a particular entity, be that an organisation, a product, or an individual.  There are international guidelines for calculating footprints, and in some cases these have been translated into carbon calculators – such as the UK Government’s Act on CO2 website – that generate your carbon footprint when you fill in data about your energy consumption and travelling habits.  Measuring a carbon footprint and communicating it to customers is something that progressively more companies are doing – both for their organisation as a whole and for particular products.  A recent example is Walkers crisps: a little stamp on the front of a packet of cheese and onion crisps shows that there are 80g of carbon associated with that packet you’re eating. But does that mean Walkers are better than Sainsbury’s own?  How are we supposed to tell unless every packet of crisps has the same information on it?  And if we can’t use the information to choose which is the most environmentally friendly product, how useful is it? Carbon footprints are useful because, as the old adage goes ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure’.  In measuring emissions from a particular product, companies get a baseline from which to start reducing their carbon footprints.  The exercise also helps them to see where the largest sources of pollution are in the supply and distribution of their products – and that in turn helps them to decide where to focus their emission reduction efforts. On measuring the carbon footprint of Ariel washing powder, Procter and Gamble realised that the most polluting activity in the lifecycle of the product was actually the energy customers were using to operate their washing machines at high temperatures.  This led the company to focus its efforts on developing and promoting a washing powder that washed well at 30 degrees C. Whilst we’re not yet choosing products or companies based on their carbon footprints, carbon footprint information does allow you to see which companies are taking steps to measure – and hopefully reduce- their impact on the environment.