Archive for the ‘Carbon footprint’ Category

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Energy Aware Computing

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Yesterdays BBC NewsNight featured a report on energy aware computing and how companies such as IBM, Cisco or Google try to tackle the increasing amount of energy consumption caused by large data centres in order to provide service to the users. Figures estimate that by the year 2020, the carbon emissions of the IT industry will be higher than airline traffic and that it’s already as high as the car industry.

You can find the report about 31 minutes into the show on BBC’s iPlayer here.

Image source: www.lbl.gov

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How the myth of food miles hurts the planet

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

How the myth of food miles hurts the planet — The Observer

‘An airplane sticker is of no environmental value whatsoever, as studies have shown air-freighted products are not necessarily less sustainable than local produce grown in heated greenhouses,’ said a spokesman for Tesco. ‘Thus we may remove those plane labels in future. What people are actually interested in is the amount of carbon that is emitted during a product’s manufacture and import.’ As a result, Tesco has promised to put carbon labels on 30 of its own-brand products in the near future: six types of potatoes, 11 types of tomatoes, five types of washing power and liquid capsules, four types of orange juice and six types of light bulbs. ‘We want to see how customers react and find out how it affects their purchasing behaviour,’ added the spokesman.

Posted in Carbon footprint, Food Labels, General | No Comments »

German Railway’s Environmental Mobility Check

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

The German railway operator “Deutsche Bahn” offers an “Environmental Mobility Check” during the booking procedure. You can compare your train journey with other options such as car or plane. They show several charts and tables comparing for example energy consumption, carbon dioxides or sulfur dioxides. Have a look at the screenshot for a travel from Hamburg to Munich.

Posted in Carbon footprint, General, UI, consumers | No Comments »

Green food heats up

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

New Zealand and Australia’s farmers are fighting back against the concept of food miles:

As counter-intuitive as it is, a study by New Zealand’s Lincoln University last year found that New Zealand dairy products sold in Britain, even allowing for shipping, used only half the energy and emissions per tonne than did their British equivalents. For lamb, it was only a quarter. Like size, distance isn’t everything.

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The eco-diet … and it’s not just about food miles

Monday, June 4th, 2007

The eco-diet … and it’s not just about food miles

“I’m a bit worried about the food miles [debate] because it is educating the consumer in the wrong way. It is such an insignificant point,” said Ruth Fairchild at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. “Those [foods] could have been produced using pesticides that have travelled all the way around the world. If you just take food miles, it is the tiny bit on the end.”A better system, she argues, would be one that considers all environmental impacts from farm to dinner plate.

One option is ecological footprint analysis, which takes into account the amount of land needed to provide the resources to produce food, both directly on the farm and indirectly from the energy that goes into growing, harvesting, processing, packaging and transporting it. A food’s impact is measured in “global hectares”, the notional land area needed to produce it. But she thinks that consumers are not yet ready for ecological footprint labelling and the science behind it is not yet watertight.

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Greener by miles

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

More on the need for a more sophisticated measure of carbon footprints than food miles:

Greener by miles – Sunday Telegraph

Analysis of the industry reveals that for many foods, imported products are responsible for lower carbon dioxide emissions than the same foodstuffs produced in Britain. Even products shipped from the other side of the world emit fewer greenhouse gases than British equivalents.

The reasons are manifold. Sometimes it is because they require less fertiliser; sometimes, as with greenhouse crops, less energy; sometimes, as with much African produce, the farmers use little mechanised equipment. The findings are surprising environmental campaigners, who have, until now, used the distance travelled by food as the measure of how polluting it is.

Posted in Carbon footprint, Tracing & Tracking | No Comments »

Plan for carbon footprint on every label

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

It seems that retailers are already having trouble getting over complex information about carbon footprints using small labels on products. A fair tracing-style product information system could overcome this difficulty — and also be used to provide much more dynamic information. After all, supply chains are unlikely to remain static throughout the lifetime of a particular product’s packaging design…

Plan for carbon footprint on every label – Daily Telegraph

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs joined forces yesterday with the Carbon Trust, a Government advisory body, to try to agree how to measure greenhouse gases in the manufacturing process.This would allow retailers eventually to label their products with a “carbon point” score in the same way that electrical appliances receive an energy score.

Posted in Carbon footprint, Tracing & Tracking, UI | No Comments »

Carbon Trust Launches Carbon Reduction Label

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

(Picture source: BBC News)

Carbon Trust reports

The Carbon Trust has launched a new carbon reduction label to provide a measure of a products carbon footprint across its life cycle from source to store, to disposal of the finished product…the label will also allow a business to demonstrate a commitment to manage and reduce the carbon emissions of its product as well as helping everyone in the UK start to make informed decisions about the products that they buy…recent research carried out for the Carbon Trust concludes that companies see climate change as the primary issue likely to impact upon their corporate reputation during 2007…

Read the BBC article.

To find out more or to submit an expression of interest visit www.carbon-label.co.uk.

What do you think about carbon labels? Would such a label affect your purchase decision? Let us know by leaving a comment.

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Reveal Labeling Initiative

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007


The Reveal Labeling Initiative is designing product labels to convey environmental impact, including information such as manufacturing energy and recyclable/reusable post-consumer content.

Posted in Carbon footprint, Design, General | No Comments »

Food, energy and fuel

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

Last month’s Doors 9: Food, energy and fuel conference was a great opportunity for several of the Fair Tracing team to meet like-minded designers and activists. You can read some after-event musings from organiser John Thackara.

Most relevant for us were the following projects:

  • Starbucks’ food certification: an end-to-end software system to track coffee certified as meeting Starbucks’ standards.
  • Massive Change, whose project lead Jennifer Leonard works for design and PR agency IDEO for clients such as Campbells Soups on communicating the environmental impact of products.
  • farmsubsidy.org, an example of tracking certain food attributes (in this case, European agricultural subsidies) using information provided by third parties.
  • Carboncare, a design project to convey the carbon footprint of products to consumers.
  • Beeline, a Canadian project to create less polluting distribution chains between farmers. Could logistics information in a fair tracing system be used to similarly redesign distribution chains — perhaps on the fly?

Posted in Carbon footprint, General, Tracing & Tracking, conferences | No Comments »

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