Requirements on Consumer Information about Product ... - ANEC

Consumer Information about PCF
Carbon Index is shown as a green band which gives the position of the environmental impact
of the product on a scale of levels (weak impact – strong impact). The graduations are fixed
in partnership with ADEME 6 . However it is not explained on the website what exactly the
reference for this benchmarking is.
Background for the index is the calculation of the CO2e emissions of the respective product
in the following life cycle phases: stages in production (agricultural for foodstuffs),
manufacturing the product, transport from the field to Casino warehouses, packaging from
the extraction of the raw materials to recycling, distribution from Casino warehouses to the
consumer’s home. The use phase (storage and preparation at consumer’s home) and end-of
life are not included. Casino plans to label all 3.000 food products that they offer with the
Casino Carbon Index, currently 32 different products are labelled.
Critical acclaim:
Although the integration of a benchmarking scheme in the Casino Carbon Index in principal
is helpful to consumers, the whole approach lacks transparency: Neither is information
available on how the displayed figure had been calculated nor where the benchmarking
scheme originates from. Does the green ruler show the market range for the very product in
question of all competitors or only the range of Casino products? Is it connected to the very
product at all? There is no information on the product itself or on the website of Casino that
might enable consumers to judge this. Besides that the ruler is mainly green therefore
consumers may think that every product / figure is good enough. Anyway it has to be
questioned if the available data are precise enough to allow at all for such rating. It remains
unclear how other products of the same product group would perform and whether there is a
difference at all. Within Casino products one might expect that the same method is applied
for the calculation of the PCF of different products and therefore the results may be assumed
being comparable somehow. Given labelled products from different retailers (e.g. in France
the retailer E.Leclerc also displays PCF figures 7 ) this will surely not be true. Additionally, the
labelling process does not include stakeholder involvement.
Summing up the Casino Carbon Index cannot be recommended as reasonable consumer
information.
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ADEME: Agence de l'Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l'Energie
E.Leclerc bases its calculations on generic but not on specific LCA data which does allow for the comparison
of different product groups but not the comparison of single products within one product group.
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