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Labelling or not labelling, that is the question

Photos: Roamallday/Flickr.

Being a “good” and “green” consumer isn’t easy. Trying to be climate-conscious while buying my food, going shopping in my local supermarket can sometimes take rather a long time. Vegetables have to be checked. Where are they grown? Is it the right season for this crop, or has it been grown in an artificially heated greenhouse? Sometimes things are even impossible to check on the spot, and would require hours of research.
To rectify this, the Swedish associations KRAV and Swedish Seal are now about to introduce a new climate label. The first product to be labelled is milk, but others will follow when more farms are certified.

This will make things easier for consumers, is the argument behind the label. But everyone doesn’t agree. Recently the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation criticized the idea, arguing that a climate label will be too one-dimensional and that we need to take into account other types of environmental influence too, such as eutrophication, increased use of fertilizers or threats to the biodiversity.

The Swedish Seal, on their hand, argues that climate change is an urgent problem, and that we can’t wait until there is a label that includes all kinds of environmental influence that a product has. And the organic certification program KRAV says it will include climate consideration into its coveted seal.

Labelling or not, I get the feeling that the responsibility tends to land on the consumer in the end any way. As a radio show that discussed this issue last week pointed out, an increasing number of different labels are emerging on the market. Some are very serious, with strict rules and an independent third part who certify. Some are just nice pictures on packages, making us think we are buying something environmentally conscious.
So is there maybe even a risk that consumers in the end feel overwhelmed by all these labels? And that we will eventually spend the same amount of time checking what the different labels stand for as we did before, trying to check the food?

Comment on this entry

There are 3 comments on this article:

Pol

Country:  Croatia, Nov 2, 2009

Besides ecological and nutrinitonal labeling it would be also excellent if every product would also have social label (respect the wellbeing and standard of living of workers and of society in the process) and also animal wellbeing. This is, i think, also crucial for suistainability, removing unsound market competitivity. The lack of place on packaging could be solved with simple encoding (A, B, C, D, E; color markings or similar) and complex graphic or numerical encoding (for detail data).

Sara

Country:  Jeswani, Nov 1, 2009

Here is an interesting feature about the climate label and the proposals from the Swedish National Food Administration, that I have written about earlier, from New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/world/europe/23degrees.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=sweden&st=cse

Pol

Country:  Croatia, Oct 30, 2009

Yes, i really don`t understand why there can`t be an agreement what to produce and how to produce. It`s always some kind of a feeling like it would put in jeopardy the allmighty free-market principle. And yesterday i got an e-mail from one german company on one bussines-service proposition. I was really shocked with content - it seemed like they were talking about market as some form of battlefield. ...

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