carbon labeling

On face value, it sounds like a great initiative - supermarkets labelling products, which would allow customers to see at a glance how much greenhouse gas was used to produce the product.

However further into the article, the real story is simply:

"Woolworths and the Australian Food and Grocery Council will examine the benefits of carbon labelling."
The cynic within is screaming "bandwagon, bandwagon!"

Let's face it, supermarket retailing in itself is a particularly ugly business. The carbon footprint of supermarkets within themselves is fundamentally obscene - think of the open refrigerator cabinets groaning under the weight of an array of products that come in all shapes, sizes and packaging.

Do you really think analysing the carbon footprint of a product from go to woe, is going to be in their best interest? Do you really think the benefit of such labeling (to whom the benefit falls I am uncertain) will be a cost effective exercise?

At the end of the day, these corporations are interested in profit and shareholder returns, and share price.

To quote from the article,

"Only 8 per cent of Australia's largest companies believed climate change posed a present threat to their business, a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found, but there is an emerging market for "green" businesses.

Last year, consumers spent $12billion on LOHAS goods - a marketing term for lifestyles of health and sustainability."

4 comments:

purple goddess said...

colour me cynical.

Anonymous said...

And here's me thinking Woolies and Coles were only interested in flogging tins to make money.
It transpires they were only doing that as a smokescreen and to give them time to come up with a plan to save us all from global destruction.
I'm smacked in the gob.

Anonymous said...

Hey Grocer, learned me a new trick on Friday.
Coles display a series of coded numbers on their price labels for each item.
To the left of the lablel over the actual large font of the price is a number that indicates over a period of a week how many of this item was sold.
Invaluable info for someone doing research on the popularity of some items dont you think?

grocer said...

thanks Gobbler. I did not know that. It's so rare i visit stupidmarkets these days.