Carbon labelling comes to a supermarket near you...

Tesco opens up another front on the green supermarket war today, by announcing that products will now be labelled with their individual carbon footprint. Tesco are hot on the heels of Marks and Spencer who stole a march on their rivals to lead the sector on green credentials, by being the first to charge for carrier bags. A move that sounds as good for business as it does for the environment.

Tesco is to become the world’s first supermarket group to launch a major trial of carbon labelling on its own-brand products. The Carbon Reduction Label developed by the Carbon Trust will soon appear on 20 Tesco products in four different categories: laundry detergent, orange juice, potatoes and light bulbs.... Read the full press release here.

Product level carbon labelling was bound to happen sooner or later, and I don't take any credit for predicting it here some weeks ago. Whether this takes off or not, and leads to a genuine reduction in the production of CO2, only time will tell. It's easy to think that people will see this and think twice about which product to buy, searching and substituting for greener alternatives. That might certainly be true of hardened environmentalists but for the ordinary shopper this additional dimension of choice may not come in to play very much at all.

Today's ordinary shopper has a vast array of choice in picking between variants of a similar product. On top of the traditional hard-core options of brand and price, we can opt in for healthy eating (Be good to yourself), quality (Finest, Taste the Difference), ethics (Fairtrade), organic (inc non GM) to name but a few. How 'carbon' as an option competes amongst these existing choices will be interesting to see. i.e. High Carbon but Fairtrade vs Low Carbon non Fairtrade etc.

Whilst I might be questioning the effectiveness of carbon labelling in driving consumer choice, what I think is more certain is that labelling of products will drive down the carbon footprints via the suppliers. Some suppliers will want to be seen at the cutting edge of green manufacturing and will lead the reduction in Carbon values. For those that don't want to lead from the front, they won't want to get at the back of the back either. Once product level carbon measurement becomes more common, it won't be long before the media start running column inches and documentaries exposing high polluting suppliers.

Whilst consumers might find it hard to differentiate products, on the basis of their green credentials, at the shelf edge. They might find it easier to do from the comfort of their living room...