Have you ever bought something marked with a carbon label? The chances are slim, given that very few food or drink brands disclose them. Quorn, which produces alternatives to meat, and dairy-free brand Oatly, are two exceptions.
This isn’t how it was supposed to be. Around 17 years ago, Tesco promised to put a carbon footprint on all its products. Walkers crisps also bought into the concept, as did Boots, the high street chemist. I recall reporting on the news for The Grocer and there was undoubtedly a buzz around these labels – an acceptance at least that our food consumption patterns matter when it comes to climate change. Don’t forget this was 2009!
But little more than three years later and the project crashed and burned as the supermarket criticised its competitors for not joining in and complained about how much it was costing to measure the greenhouse gas emissions from individual products. “[…] it was 10 years ahead of its time,” David North, who worked on the initiative in his role as Tesco’s corporate affairs director, told me a couple of years ago.
Carbon labels still haven’t stuck but that hasn’t prevented food and drink corporates from cashing in on an opportunity to greenwash their customers with carbon claims. The marketers knew that putting ‘74g CO2e’ on a pack of cheese and onion crisps meant nothing unless every flavour produced by every brand had a ‘footprint’ generated by the same method of calculating carbon (and other greenhouse gas) emissions.
But imagine if you could take that a step further – and convince customers that your crisps are more sustainable than the ones either side on the shelf without waiting for them all to have carbon labels? By calling them ‘carbon neutral’, for example.
The catchphrase quickly caught on, with restaurants using it too. The beauty was that any food, drink or meal could be labelled ‘carbon neutral’ so long as the carbon footprint had been calculated and the resulting emissions had been ‘offset’ – through buying carbon credits. Some companies even encouraged people to neutralise their meals by adding the cost of credits – for projects ranging from tree planting and supply of cleaner cooking stoves to renewable energy generation – to their bill.
Worried about having steak and chips again? Fear not, just pay a few pence more and your conscience will be clear. Flights across the world could even be offset to ‘carbon neutral’ for just a few quid.
Leon, the ‘ethical’ fast food chain, was one chain that bought into the carbon neutral concept – announcing a “first” with the launch of its “carbon neutral burgers and fries” in January 2021, and putting carbon footprints on its menus. “[…] the resulting carbon footprint […is] offset with rainforest conservation and afforestation projects in Latin America, as well as a progressive new afforestation project in the UK,” noted ClimatePartner, the company behind the calculations.
This all sounds ok. The thinking was that brands were doing their bit now, while they worked on ways to actually reduce their emissions rather than offset them. And marketers loved the neat and tidy catchphrase.
Addicted to carbon claims
The trouble was that buying credits for carbon ‘saved’ somewhere else proved so much easier and cheaper than reducing carbon.
But beneath the carbon neutral claim lies a mess of dubious offsetting schemes, poorly scoped out emissions accounting, and an easy opportunity to mislead the public. “Purporting to be carbon neutral has become a popular marketing strategy for companies seeking to give their image a green makeover while continuing to pollute with impunity,” noted Brussels-based not-for-profit Carbon Market Watch.
As well as Leon, carbon neutral claims were being made by the likes of Nando’s, Benugo, Starbucks and KitKat (owned by Nestlé). Whether these were in good faith isn’t clear – but when people started asking tough questions it was clear there were bad actors in this space.
The media and academics began working together to unpick the murky world of voluntary carbon credits, which these carbon neutral brands had relied on to improve their image. These are credits that could be bought for as little as a few pence per tonne, with little oversight on whether, in reality, carbon is being stored or saved (you will probably recall airlines and oil companies being outed for buying millions of credits to offset their huge carbon footprints).
Research into Verra – the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market – by The Guardian, German weekly Die Zeit and investigative journalists at non-profit SourceMaterial, found that more than 90% of its rainforest offset credits (which are among the most commonly used by companies) are likely to be “phantom credits” and “do not represent genuine carbon reductions”.
This prompted some serious backtracking. Companies like Leon tried to do this quietly (I didn’t let them) while others I spoke to admitted that climate neutral claims were dead in the water, forever tied to greenwashing through the need for (the now controversial) carbon offsets. Some have decided to invest in credits for projects closer to home, for example here in the UK, while others have diverted the cash they were spending on carbon credits to reducing their carbon emissions rather than offsetting them. Whether some have simply dropped their claims, stopped buying credits, and invested the money in non-environmental projects, like cost cutting or marketing, is moot.
Not all carbon credits are bad, of course, but understanding whether a carbon neutral claim is under-pinned with robust credits that are actually saving carbon is tough. That’s why regulators here and in the EU are looking to ban such claims, or at least tighten the rules around making them so much that only fools would use their carbon footprints in such a way.
The WL GLOSSARY is written by journalist David Burrows, who specialises in sustainable business. Throughout the series, we look to break down the woolly, misleading, and mendacious terms, language & logos in our food system – and provide citizens with information that they can use to make more empowered choices.
