Far Foods Carbon Footprint Labels

8 by LiveOAK Staff on August 14, 2009

So you are buying organic and mostly local, that's pretty good, but if you live in New England like me come winter time local produce is a little harder to come by so end up buying tomatoes from... China!? The fact is there's no reliable and easy way to know where your produce is coming from in many grocery stores. That leaves you in the dark about how fresh your produce really is and what kind of carbon footprint it has. Actually, even if you knew your carrots traveled 3000 miles to get to your kitchen would you know the carbon footprint? Probably not. Enter carbon footprint labeling.

The concept is not new but UK designer James Reynolds has designed airline styled produce tag dubbed "Far Foods" that's really straight forward...

Printed right on the label is the origin of the produce, the distance travelled and the resulting amount of carbon that has been released into the air. The customer also gets a receipt that looks like a borading pass with a removable carbon tally at the bottom...

The concept of eco-labels is pretty complex but this cool concept helps overcoming one hurdle of making the labels straight forward and easy to understand.

http://www.paystolivegreen.com Patrick

That is pretty sad that so many things we eat come from so far away. It’s not big surprise that produce in our country is so much more expensive than meats. We as a country need to switch back to buying foods that are locally grown so that we can eliminate this huge carbon footprint we are leaving.

http://greenupgrader.com Matt Embrey

Agreed, there’s many reason to shop local.

lmiller867

While the idea is indeed admirable the implementation itself is meaningless. Merely knowing how far away something was grown or produced doesn’t provide any realistic data on its carbon footprint. The distance traveled is only one factor in the carbon footprint and is meaningless without information about more of transport and quantity transported. If produce is more local but transported in smaller loads via less efficient means of transport then the transportation may produce more carbon emissions than bulk loads from further away. Air transport is less efficient than container ship transport, truck transport is less efficient than rail. And mileages are shared by all other cargo that travels with your produce. Buying produce with these labels might give you a farm fuzzy in side by making you think you’re doing something good for the environment but at best these labels distract attention away from the true ecological cost of shipping and at worst might also lead to people choosing worse choices for the environment based on incomplete data.
smolove

This is an AMAZING concept, putting the real impact of our consumer choices in easily understood terms (although perhaps oversimplified). But I love it.
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If produce is more local but transported in smaller loads via less efficient means of transport then the transportation may produce more carbon emissions than bulk loads from further away.
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