Environmental Labels

One of the ideas behind nutritional labels is that the government doesn't keep us from eating food that is bad for us, but they do make sure that we are informed about it if we want to be.

Now if people want to eat themselves into the grave you can't really stop them. But if people want to eat healthy they can do that easily.

The same thing can not be said about people who want to try to 'live green.'

Certainly people can try simple things like turning off the lights, composting, and not wasting water. But when it comes to making purchases it can become a bit more murky.

I propose, in the same way foods have nutritional labels, other products have environmental impact labels.

Now there are a lot of issues with this that I am going to address. The first one is exactly how do you quantify environmental impact. I believe that such a label should contain the following information.

Manufacturing Emissions: This is how many pounds of CO2 that were produced in the manufacturing of the product. Not only does this include the emissions from the factory where it was built but also the emissions from factories that built required parts. It would also need to include emissions caused by electrical power consumed by the factory. This last number could be reduced easily if a company purchases power from a 'clean' source. This number would be calculated by monitoring the emissions from a factory over a years time and dividing by the number of the product produced.

Transportation Emissions: This would be a measure of, on average, how much CO2 is created in transporting a product from the factory to the store. This is obviously going to be higher for products made oversees. This could perhaps encourage people to buy local. Of course unless labels were printed for each region it would not specify how much emissions were produced getting the product to your particular store.

Manufacturing Biodegradable Waste: Manufacturing is going to produce a certain amount of waste. Luckily some of it may be biodegradable or at least semi-biodegradable. In some cases the waste may even be recyclable. This category as well as the following waste categories would include waste produced earlier in the manufacturing chain in producing any parts or materials that go into the product. This type of waste would have the least negative impact on the environment and a conscious consumer would want to see most of the waste fall into this category.

Manufacturing Regular Waste: The measures how many pounds of non-biodegradable, but non hazardous waste are manufactured in the production process. This would include plastics, metal slag, and the like. While its not great to have this stuff filling our landfills for hundreds of years, there are worst types of waste.

Manufacturing Hazardous Waste: This measures how much hazardous waste is produced. Basically any type of dangerous chemical byproduct that needs special handling would fall into this category. Its inevitable that some products will produce hazardous waste but people would want to avoid products that seem to produce excessive amounts of this type of waste.

Packaging Waste: How much waste is there in the packaging. This might not be a necessary entry as it should be obvious by looking at the product.

Product Waste Breakdown: A listing of the type of waste that will be produced when the product is thrown away. This is more to help put things into perspective with the manufacturing waste scores.

Power Consumption: A clear label of how much power (if any) this product consumes. Rather than just looking for an 'energy star' label a consumer could clearly be able to find the 'peak,' the 'average,' and the 'standby' power consumed by electronics.

These are the only major categories that I can think of that I would want to see on the label and that could easily be measured. They could be given as both straight up values, and also in percentage form measured against the weight of the product.

Note, this isn't requiring companies to meet any types of standards in terms of being 'green.' With these labels they can be inefficient as they want. What it is requiring is accountability. Companies need to keep tabs on how much they are polluting and also need to consider how much their suppliers are polluting. A company may have incentive to switch to a 'cleaner' supplier in order to improve their numbers.

One issue with this is that it would require a fair bit of governmental oversight to ensure that numbers are being accurately reported. Now some of this oversight could be paid for by fining companies for cheating or misreporting.

Another issue would be the international complications. Do you disallow products that lack this information from being imported? What happens if a company wants to buy steel from another country that does not track the environmental impact of their actions.

One option for that last example at least, is that the company buying the steel must assume 'worst case' environmental impact from the steel if they can not get solid numbers. This could perhaps lead them to encourage their supplier to start keeping track of things.

In the end though there is one major problem. It is a similar problem that nutritional labels have. An environmental label can only have a real impact if people actually care. Of course, part of my hope is that the label would make it easier to care.