Carbon footprint labeling: Are you ready for it?
Junko Yoshida, George Leopold
(12/17/2009 7:50 AM EST)
URL: eetimes.com
PARIS — If you happen to be an electronics company fairly satisfied that your products comply with the nightmarish variety of "green" regulations like ROHS, WEEE and REACH, wait a minute. There's a new layer of regulation on the horizon: carbon-footprint labeling.
Bruno Berthon
Managing Director, Accenture
Pending regulations for such labels -- very much like nutrition labels posted on food products -- are already in the works in Europe, driven by the European Union, which has set 2012 as its implementation target date. The French government is also floating the idea of getting this done by 2011.
The implication to the electronics industry is that it's no longer enough to inform consumers how little power your company's electronics product consumes. You need to specify the quantity (in grams) of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with the manufacture, transport and recycling of your product.
Don't roll your eyes.
Regulators in Europe are planning to introduce carbon-footprint labeling for every product -- ranging from potato chips to shampoos.
Asked if electronics products will also be subject to this regulation, Bruno Berthon, managing director, responsible for sustainability services at Accenture, said, "It will be naturally a priority," considering the big carbon footprint electronics products produce.
Will carbon-footprint labels look like this?
According to Gartner's report entitled "Green IT: A New Industry Shock Wave," computing and telecom equipment is responsible for 2 percent of all global carbon emissions. The number is rapidly rising as demand for information technology increases.
Driven by retailers
The idea for carbon-footprint labels is not new. Big retailers such as Tesco in the U.K., Carrefour in France, and Wal-Mart in the United States have embraced the idea.
In the U.K., for the last few years, retailers have been already working on a carbon-footprint labeling scheme in collaboration with the Carbon Trust, an environmental consultancy funded by the British Government.
Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, is developing a new measure, called by some in the industry as "Wal-Mart Index." The system will rate environmental and social sustainability of products over the course of their "lives." Wal-Mart has already recruited academics, supply chain experts and environmental groups to help create and implement the electronic indexing system within the next five years.
Beyond the Wal-Mart initiative, carbon-footprint labeling discussions among U.S. industry groups and the federal government, specific to electronics products, haven't surfaced.
"There is far more interest in energy [efficiency] disclosure for electronics" than in disclosing broader life-cycle metrics, said Doug Johnson, senior director of technology policy at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA, Arlington, Va.). "This is one more piece of information" consumers can use when buying new products.
The industry group maintains that smaller, faster, cheaper consumer devices by themselves help reduce the industry's carbon footprint by significantly reducing power consumption and the bill of materials for new products.
CEA helped "shape" language in the 2007 energy bill approved by Congress that directed the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to launch a rulemaking proceeding on how to disclose energy usage to consumers for a broader range of products beyond appliances. Five new categories were added under the FTC process to disclose energy efficiency information for TVs, PCs, monitors, digital video recorders along with cable and satellite set-top boxes.
CEA is also working on standards for measuring energy usage in these products. However, the upcoming carbon-footprint labeling regulations in Europe are not among CEA's talking points -- just yet.
But electronics companies understand they must address the "life cycle" issue, and are preparing sustainability initiatives to address environmental issues.
CEA recently released the initial version of a "sustainability report" that addresses issues like "eco-design of products" and "green" manufacturing.
The report stresses environmentally-friendly product design and the benefits of "green" facilities and manufacturing and clean delivery. "Most [CEA members] now have explicit [design-for-environment] programs, and others include some of these principles as part of cost reduction efforts," the report noted.
How to calculate the carbon footprint of a product
Calculating the carbon footprint of a product will not be easy.
Any measurement needs to factor in the carbon emission associated with building factories in which a product was manufactured, along with packaging it, delivering it to the store and disposing of it.
To calculate all this seems a herculean task especially when measuring the amount of greenhouse gases involved in the manufacture of some goods like cars and electronics, which use complex supply chains.
The U.K. government agency, the Carbon Trust, has been making specific recommendations on methodologies. The French government agency, ADEME (Agence de l'Environnement et de la Maitrise De l'Energie), has also created a carbon-footprint methodology called Le Bilan Carbone. Separately, ADEME recently issued a request-for-proposals for IT solutions -- necessary to make carbon-footprint labeling operational. The RFP deadline is February, 2010.
All in all, European government agencies and scholars are trying to develop a methodology that works across thousands of products. They plan to use average figures when available (i.e., a average of transport emissions for delivery of a product from one place to another; and using national averages when calculating product recycles, etc.).
Accenture's Berthon is optimistic despite the inevitable challenges posed by implementation of carbon- footprint labels -- especially for electronics products.
"We already have a well-known methodology called a 'Life Cycle Assessment (LCA),'" he noted.
The LCA is designed to compare the full range of environmental and social damages assignable to products and services. The idea is to let people choose the least burdensome one.
The 'life cycle' concept is well-known. It can be used to optimize the environmental performance of a single product or to upgrade the environmental performance of a company.
The procedures of LCA are part of the ISO 14000 environmental management standards.
Berthon, said, for example, for each component necessary for a manufacturer to build an electronic system, "there is already a known pre-calculated figure," so that manufacturers can use it to collect information on carbon footprints.
Further, in many instances, corporations are already familiar with LCA procedures, applying them to eco-design, to managing their supply chain, streamlining logistics and devising effective recycling strategies. "They know how to use those models," Berthon said. Among all industries potentially requiring carbon-footprint labels, "those in the electronics industry are probably the most advanced, and are capable of implementing it," he added.
In contrast, measuring carbon footprints for food products presents a much more complicated proposition, he explained. Some food products originally cultivated in Africa could be shipped to the south of Spain first, then delivered to France by train, packaged in France, then trucked to far-flung stores in Germany. The variations on such a scenario, moreover, are almost infinite.
Nobody is saying that the carbon footprint label of an article will be the most important method to measuring the effectiveness of carbon reduction.
Certainly for electronics products such as TVs and computers, for example, it may be far more effective to get rid of the "standby" mode from such products, thus forcing consumers to change their usage behavior.
But if the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen this week is any indication, the focus among politicians, protesters and the business community has already moved from whether the global warming is real to questions of "how" to apply specific methodologies and gain clearer perspectives on "carbon price," so that carbon can be tradable and used for investment in the future.
"The climate change summit is turning into more of a trade summit," observed Berthon, who was in Copenhagen for several days this week. Some countries are already proceeding with plans for a "border adjustment tax" on imports from countries that do not constrain their carbon output.
On a positive note, many business executives have already begun taking a much more holistic view on carbon emissions.
The Coca-Cola Company announced days before the summit their plans to replace 100 percent of their vending machines and coolers with carbon neutral equipment (specifically, hydrofluorocarbon-free) by 2015. The transition to HFC-free refrigeration is expected to reduce the equipment's direct greenhouse gas emissions by 99 percent. |
