AUTUMN FOCUS

The Impact

of

BY BILLY FLYNN

Have you ever looked at a food item and wondered whether purchasing and consuming this is good or bad for the planet? No doubt you have. As the effects of climate change and the biodiversity crisis become ever more apparent, environmentconscious consumers are increasingly considering the impact that their shopping basket may be having on the world. The UK’s food standards agency showed that over half of UK shoppers want to make more sustainable decisions on the environmental impacts of foods. However, faced with aisle after aisle of myriad products, how could you ever know what this is? Some common-sense can confidently be applied to the question. For example, fresh produce that hasn’t travelled far from its point of origin is going to be easier on the planet than something processed from far away. It’s just not always so clear though. For example, what about a product that contains "FRESH PRODUCE THAT HASN’T TRAVELLED FAR FROM ITS POINT multiple ingredients? Help is on the way. We’ve been asking ourselves about the carbon footprint of food for a while OF ORIGIN IS now. In 2020, Mike GOING TO BE Berners-Lee produced an EASIER ON THE PLANET THAN SOMETHING PROCESSED updated edition of his earlier guide 'How Bad are Bananas? – the carbon footprint of everything'. This contains a few FROM FAR AWAY." surprises. Not least of which is that contrary to this author’s previous belief, bananas aren’t that bad at all – at least in terms of the tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent that it takes to get them up and grown and into our mouths. This carbon accounting does not however, take into account land-use, pesticides needed, packaging or any of the other ways a food product can impact on the environment. In early August of this year, researchers in Oxford University’s Martin School produced an estimate of the environmental impact of around 57,000 items that are sold in supermarkets in the United Kingdom and Ireland1. This is the first study of its kind and looked at the greenhouse gas emissions, land-use, water-use and aquatic eutrophication potential of all of these items sold across eight major retail chains. It provides a ‘cradle to shelf’ accounting

for more commonly available items than any other such study. Rather than painstakingly looking into the ‘back-story’ of these it did so using an algorithm that was developed and tested for the project. This algorithm was ‘taught’ to calculate the environmental impact by using known impact measurements of the ingredients of each item. Food regulations in the UK and Ireland require the producers to list these ingredients in descending order. The algorithm was therefore able to assess the overall impact of each product by simply being told how much of each ingredient was in the product under scrutiny. The end result was a scoring system that that listed the combined impact of each product on a numeric scale.

The headline results mightn’t come as a shock. Beef and lamb are the worst, scoring 34.72. Other meat came in a long way back in second place at 10.04. Coffee weighs in at 6.39 and Tea at 5.44. At the lowest end of the scale, fizzy drinks such as energy drink scored only 0.21, which may surprise some readers. Overall the study showed there is an overlap between healthy and nutritious food and low environmental impact.

Previous efforts to make carbon labelling a standard across all products have previously come unstuck, due in the main to the sheer volume of products out there and the fact that new items are being added all the time. In 2012, Tesco shelved its plans to carbon-account for everything it sold, some 70,000-odd items. The retail giant realised that this would simply take too long to do, adding only 125 completely assessed items each year. This new study could break that log-jam and produce a simple and understandable way to label our purchased items in terms of overall environmental impact. This could make a real difference, especially if it breaks down previously held convictions.

The Oxford study has its limitations though and these are acknowledged by the authors. The algorithm doesn’t account for the different sources of the same product that may be produced in different countries. This is pertinent to an ongoing debate in Ireland where, it has been said, meat and dairy products may arguably be produced more sustainably than anywhere else in the world. Therefore, scoring on products containing beef (e.g. ready-made lasagne)

has to be taken to contain some latitude, depending on where the beef came from. This argument will rumble on but there is now no question that reducing meat and dairy in your diet is a hugely positive step in terms of emissions reduction. The study does though provide a huge step forward in making the impacts of our purchasing choices tangible and accessible for shoppers here in Ireland and our nearest "WHILE PREVIOUS CARBON ACCOUNTING MAY HAVE LANDED IN THE ‘TOO MUCH BOTHER’ BASKET BACK IN 2012, THE WORLD HAS MOVED ON SINCE THEN." neighbours in the UK. In a year of extreme weather events, wildfires and water shortages, this study has come at a good time. While previous carbon accounting may have landed in the ‘too much bother’ basket back in 2012, the world has moved on since then. Our appetite for change and for food that weighs less on our common environment has grown. Greater buy-in is expected.