Tesco to introduce carbon footprint labels

Tesco will today announce it is to team up with The Carbon Trust to develop carbon labels for 30 of its own-brand products.

The pilot project will see the supermarket develop labels that will show customers the full carbon footprint of its tomatoes, potatoes, orange juice, light bulbs and washing detergent products.

The calculations to measure the so-called "embodied carbon" resulting from these products' full lifecycles will be undertaken using the new Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 2050 standard currently being developed by The Carbon Trust, Defra and BSI British Standards.

Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy said the pilot scheme, which joins similar projects between The Carbon Trust, Walkers Crisps, Boots and Innocent Smoothies, would make it easier for customers to make greener choices.

"While there's still a long way to go, mapping the carbon footprint of these few products will yield invaluable data that will benefit all those retailers and producers who are working towards combating climate change," he added.

Tom Delay, chief executive of The Carbon Trust, said the scheme would be crucial in testing how the new draft standard – which entered its consultation phase earlier this month – applies across different sectors and categories.

A Tesco spokesman agreed that the company would help test the practicality of the new standard. "The science to measure embodied carbon exists – this is not Star Wars stuff," he said. "But what Tesco brings to the party is a track record in implementation [of these type of initiatives]."

He added that there was evidence that providing information on a product's carbon footprint would help inform customer's purchasing decisions.

"The best corollary is that when we started to put more nutritional information on products we saw an immediate impact on sales of healthier products," he said. "It is a similar process to what we are doing with carbon labels."

However, despite the expansion of The Carbon Trust's pilot projects, it is still likely to be some time before the standard is ratified and carbon labels are widely adopted. The Tesco spokesman declined to give a date for wider rollout of the labels, claiming the company was focused on "getting it right" first.