Just as we’re all coming to terms with the need to ‘think green’ before we dare to switch on a lamp or print out an email, the energy-efficiency aficionados
decide to bombard us with an even more tangible and emotive concept. Remember the phrase “Take only memories, leave only footprints,” popularised by eco-tourism a while back? Well, now the footprints have turned black - as in carbon black - and we’re being widely discouraged from leaving any of them anywhere. If some of the policy-makers get their way, every product on sale, from shampoo to shallots, will be stamped with a carbon footprint. But the jury is still out on exactly who will benefit from this decision.
The launch of the Carbon Trust’s Carbon Reduction Label, back in March, was openly welcomed by several of the UK’s largest companies, including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Tesco - which pledged to issue all 70,000 of its products with carbon labels. Another strong supporter, smoothie manufacturer Innocent Drinks, has already calculated the carbon footprint of its mango and passionfruit 250ml smoothie as 294g, while Walkers has come up with the figure of 75g for its standard-sized bag of cheese and onion crisps, and has marked the bags accordingly.
With fruit and potatoes already being considered, it seems carbon labeling of fresh produce is an inexorable reality, but will people understand the concept? The general consensus seems to be a resounding ‘no’. “What’s a good carbon footprint? What’s a bad one?” asks NFU Horticulture Board chairman Richard Hirst, who is, one assumes, rather more informed than the average consumer. “If you have a bad carbon footprint, do you have a big one, and if you have a good one, it’s a little one? Walkers may have decided on 75 but what’s that? That figure means nothing to me and I don’t think it’ll mean anything to shoppers at all.”
Derek Hargreaves, technical director for the Cucumber Growers’ Association, is equally sceptical. “It’s a non-starter,” he claims. “Labelling products with the amount of carbon they’ve used is ok as long as you put everything in and how on earth are you going to do that? You are not just talking about the energy used to grow the product, there’s the growing media and the seeds, the plants, the chemicals used, fertilisers, pesticides, agronomists and consultants driving around the country, the packaging, the energy used in the packing facilities, for ventilation etc. It’s a colossal amount of detail that’s required to give you the full picture and nobody’s going to do that. You’d need huge labels to accommodate all the factors and if they’re not all listed, there’s no way to make sure everything is included.”
In fairness to Walkers and Innocent, while it will be of little use to perplexed shoppers poring over labels in store, both have listed their methods of calculation on their respective websites. According to Walkers, producing the raw materials of its cheese and onion crisps - the potatoes, sunflower and seasoning - uses 44 percent, or 33g, out of the total 75g of carbon, making it the most energy-intensive part of the chain. However, as both companies underline, such calculations are based on ‘currently available data’, which, if recent investigations into the merits of so-called ‘carbon offsetting’ are to be believed, should be taken with a rather big pinch of salt. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently reported error margins in calculating carbon emissions of up to 10 percent in fertiliser manufacture and up to 100 percent with certain agricultural processes.
In its customary consumer-friendly jargon, Innocent claims to have put ‘pretty much everything’ into the footprint calculation from emissions associated with growing the fruit to refrigerating the bottled smoothies in store. Yet the methods specified by Innocent and Walkers are too vague for comparison with each other, let alone to be useful as a universal template. For one thing, while Walkers restricts its discussion to carbon alone, Innocent talks of ‘greenhouse gas emissions’.
According to Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network, Innocent scores more points here since carbon is not the only problematic element. “More accurately, we should be talking about ‘climate footprinting’ because there are gases other than carbon dioxide to take into account,” she says. “For agriculture in particular, nitrous oxide, which is associated with fertiliser, whether organic or synthetic, is a very major greenhouse gas.” Methane should also be included, Hargreaves adds.
And the confusion doesn’t stop there since cooking and storing the produce could be considered as well. Hargreaves cites a study carried out about 18 months ago by the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) and Manchester University, which analysed the carbon emissions of frozen peas, in terms of growing, freezing, and heating them up, either by microwaving or on a gas stove. Interestingly, while microwaving is ostensibly far more efficient since gas-stove cooking takes longer, and uses more energy, the electricity powering the microwave is generated at only 30 percent efficiency at the power station, making it less energy-efficient overall.
With such an array of different information being bandied about, it is little wonder some growers are feeling rather left in the dark. “If the government wants more input from growers, then we’ve got to be better informed,” says Matt Spanton, farm manager at T G Redsell Limited. Mike Hall, director of knowledge transfer at Writtle College, readily agrees. “There’s such a myriad of conflicting information coming from a number of different agencies, be they charities or government or whatever,” he says. “Many people that we deal with, be they growers, printers or whoever, are just bewildered as to what should be their company response to some of the challenges and opportunities that seem to exist.”
Hall suggests the information would be more forthcoming if more of the UK’s funding for R&D was increased to bring it in line with the US, Japan and much of Europe. “A response needs to come more clearly from one authoritative source with tailored guidance and information that people can readily absorb and implement, preferably minimising red tape, preferably not adding further levels of beaurocracy,” he adds. “Defra is probably the most logical source.”
However, Defra, it seems, is also still some way off having any concrete information to impart. “At the moment all that Defra and Tesco and the British Standards Institute are doing is trying to figure out a sensible methodology using generic/default data to start with and then as individual growers have more specific data they can substitute it,” says Garnett, adding regretfully that SMEs are likely to be waiting longer than the larger companies, both for a workable methodology and the guidance to implement it.
Jenny Lang of the Horticulture Development Council, which is involved in trying to establish such a methodology, emphasises the complexity of the task, but claims all parties are keen to move forward as fast as possible. “We are liaising with the Carbon Trust and a number of research organisations, but because it has become so topical so quickly lots of different groups have sprung up and we’re trying to communicate with all of them and get a comprehensive picture,” she says. “The remit of any potential project we did would be to define the boundaries and work out how the carbon footprint would be measured. The group working on behalf of Tesco still hasn’t clearly defined what should or shouldn’t be included. At the moment we are still trying to build a project team but we are trying to move as fast as we can.”
Despite the difficulty involved, there are some who feel the effort is justified. “It would be great to really capture what it has cost in energy to grow crops and transport them, as opposed to just capturing that they have been air freighted,” says Debbie Winstanley, Sainsbury’s product technologist for potatoes and core vegetables. Garnett agrees that, while research by the Carbon Trust revealed consumers are keen on having carbon labels, in practice they will be too confusing so the exercise should be primarily industry-focused. “As it develops I think it’ll be a really useful tool for the supply chain as a whole to understand where its major impacts lie and then seek to reduce those impacts,” she says.
Spanton is similarly in favour of carbon accounting, in view of potential financial gains amid ever-increasing fuel prices. “We know how much it costs to run a tractor per hour and how much a year we’re spending on fuel but we haven’t broken down the figures on a crop-by-crop basis, so we don’t know exactly where we’re losing a lot of money or making money,” he says.
Others, however, are concerned the whole issue will overshadow other important factors. “Growers will want to manage down their carbon footprint because I’m sure there’ll be an additional cost associated in not doing so,” says Hall. “But we really ought not to lose sight of the fact that this country’s ability to produce food is being rapidly damaged by successive governments and their policies and if we’re not careful we may find ourselves totally dependent upon food from other countries.” Equally worrying, say many, is the fact that home production may be vilified in the process of carbon-accounting, if imports are deemed more carbon-friendly.
Hirst is sceptical about the retailers’ motives for making such calculations in the first place. “I think one of the dangers is that every supermarket will try and be seen to be better at carbon accounting than another and they don’t really know what they’re doing,” he says. While Garnett refutes the likelihood of any legislated diminishing of the UK’s production capacity, she admits there may be a resultant shift in the supermarket’s purchasing methods, which could indirectly favour imports. Or, we might see a two-tier system where supermarkets have a ‘low-carbon’ range in addition to their existing lines, she suggests.
An additional concern abounding the industry is that in the negative hype surrounding the carbon concept, people are rapidly losing sight of the positive attributes of farming. “It would be much better to focus on an environmental footprint in general,” Hirst says. “We might be using inputs that generate carbon dioxide but the land that we’re farming is one of the best soaks of carbon anyway.”
Furthermore, far from waiting for a carbon calculator to seal their fate, growers have been proactive in their efforts towards energy efficiency for some time, he continues. “The climate change levy agreement that the NFU has got in place trying to get protected crop growers to focus on energy efficiency, has, we estimate, in its first year, produced a 50,000 tonne reduction in their carbon dioxide usage.”
Meanwhile, according to Lang, the HDC received a £30,000 grant from the Carbon Trust this year to organise an energy-saving focus group of some 30 horticultural enterprises. While the success of these energy-saving techniques has been proven in previous life cycle assessments, she says, the year-long project, which began in April, will provide the participants with ongoing consultancy to help them manage their crops in accordance with any changes made to achieve demonstrable carbon savings.
The use of biofuels, or biomass, is also being investigated by various parties, although Hargreaves claims a combination of red tape and limited resources - both factual and monetary - are preventing interested growers from moving beyond the trial stage.
“There’s massive potential in biomass but the problem is in the way it’s classified as waste material, so you’ve got to have all sorts of licenses and planning permission to get the digester and to transport the waste from one place to another,” he explains. “The benefits are considerable but you can’t expect growers to invest in the technology until it’s proven.”
And, while he accepts that growers of protective crops will remain in the firing line from the pro-carbon savers, he hastens to emphasise that any energy-saving techniques adopted will prove redundant unless people face up to the far more serious problem at hand - namely, personal transport. “The main offenders in the process are consumers driving to supermarkets,” he claims. “If we were all concerned about carbon footprints we would drive 800cc cars but people won’t do that until there’s a financial incentive to do so.”
Be that as it may, all parties seem only too aware that carbon footprinting is just the latest aspect of a major green movement that is far from a passing fad. However, Garnett is quick to emphasise that it will still have to compete with other concerns topping the agenda. “Carbon footprinting is something that is growing and it will become more important as the impact of climate change affects where and how we grow our food,” she says. “But there are also immediate labour issues to think about, as we’ve seen with all those strawberries going to waste; cost of labour and sourcing etc are highly relevant. Climate change is just one of a whole spectrum of issues that will feature strongly over the next few years.”
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