Requirements on Consumer Information about Product ... - ANEC

Consumer Information about PCF
2 Introduction
The term ‘carbon footprint’ has become tremendously popular over the last few years. A
variety of different CO2 or climate protection labels partly tailored to certain product groups is
meanwhile available at the international level – e.g. Carbon Reduction Label/UK; Carrefour
Initiative (France), Stop Climate Change Label/Germany; KRAV Climate Marking Sweden
(KRAV Sweden); Climatop-Migros Switzerland, Carbon Label Initiatives or programs in
Japan (Japan Environmental Management Association for Industry), Korea (Korea Eco-
Products Institute), Thailand (Thailand Greenhouse Gas Management Organization).
Interestingly, the main focus lies on foods although individual foods are clearly less relevant
to the climate than other product groups, i.e. household appliances or automobiles. Already
existing labelling obligations as the statutory declaration of carbon footprint for electricity are
hardly covered by media and little-noticed by customers.
With climate change high up on the political and corporate agenda, carbon footprint calculations
are in strong demand. Nevertheless the focus on CO2-emissions does not only provide
possibilities, but also bears some risks that might as well weaken environmental labelling
approaches in the future. These risks include for example the negligence of environmental
impacts others than CO2, a disregard of product-quality aspects and the distortion of competition
caused by insufficiently detailed or asymmetric life cycle data.
BSI has published the PAS 2050 as the first approach for a consistent method for assessing
the life cycle GHG-emissions of goods and services. It builds on existing methods
established through EN ISO 14040 and EN ISO 14044. ISO adopted a new work item
entitled “Carbon footprint of products” which consists of 2 parts: part 1 on quantification and
part 2 on communication, in November 2008. WRI/WBCSD is standardising accounting
frameworks for assessing CO2-emissions of corporate value chains (scope 3) and products.
Against this background, ANEC commissioned the Öko-Institut e.V. to conduct a research
study on various issues related to communication of PCF to consumers. The issues involve:
(a) conditions under which CO2-indicators/labels make sense or should be avoided;
(b) conditions under which CO2-indicators/labels are useful consumer information;
(c) options to address sustainability issues ignored by CO2-indicators/labels;
(d) measures to ensure that efficiency is not neglected;
(e) formats to ensure comprehensibility to consumers, including benchmarks and scales;
(f) methods to address different energy mixes and conversion factors and their update;
(g) conventions and methodological choices which need to be defined to ensure comparability
and the necessary frameworks for this.
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