Jan 29 2009
Counting Carbon Grams to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
Carbon Label showing grams of carbon dioxide emitting during the life of the product
Last Week, PepsiCo and Carbon Trust, and independent company set up by the UK government to reduce carbon emissions in businesses and develop low carbon technology, began a partnership to certify the carbon emissions of several of the PepsiCo products!
PepsiCo is one of the largest food and beverage corporations in the world! Products such as Frito-Lay, Pepsi-Cola, Gatorade, Tropicana Juices and Quaker Foods are only a few of PepsiCo’s primary businesses. Tropicana is now the first brand in North America to be certified by Carbon Trust, by calculating the carbon footprint of one 64 ounce container of Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice, which by the way, measures out to be 1.7 kilograms.
Each product that we buy and everything that we do creates a carbon impact; in order for us to reduce that impact we needed to establish a measurement system that would work globally! That world-wide measurement system is based on the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 2050 guidelines. These guidelines require companies, such as Carbon Trust, to map out the life cycle of the product, in the case with Tropicana, this would include growing, squeezing, getting the product on the shelves and the final ridding yourself of the product. They then look at the consumption of energy that is involved with each of these stages and converts it into a carbon dioxide equivalent. Then by adding the carbon dioxide emissions from each stage of life together they can then estimate the total of the products footprint! By giving this information to the businesses, it enables them to take the steps necessary to reduce the over-all carbon footprint of the product.
Products certified by Carbon Trust will have a carbon count on the outside of the packaging to inform consumers of the carbon footprint that the product leaves behind! This means that consumers will not only be counting fat and calories from the products that they buy, but carbon grams as well!
~Wind
