Questions over ratings as Coke publishes carbon footprint
By Juliette Jowit, The Guardian, Monday 9 March 2009
Coca-Cola has become the biggest global brand to publish the greenhouse gases produced by making, packaging, transporting, chilling, and disposing of their most popular products. Photograph: Daniel Lynch/Newscast
One is a fruit drink made by a boutique company with a clutch of foodie awards and an impeccable ethical brand, which even boasts a halo on its logo. The other is a fizzy pop, famous for rotting teeth, made by a corporate giant almost synonymous with globalisation.
But when it comes to the environmental issue of the moment - the carbon footprint of their products - the bottle of Innocent smoothie comes off worse than a can of Coke. At least at first glance.
Coca-Cola today becomes the biggest global brand to publish the greenhouse gases produced by making, packaging, transporting, chilling, and disposing of their most popular products. The study, done with the government-funded Carbon Trust, shows a standard 330ml can of Coke embodies the equivalent of 170g of carbon dioxide (CO2e), and the same sized Diet Coke or Coke Zero 150g.
Coke's UK business follows Innocent, which helped the Carbon Trust pioneer its footprinting, and whose 250ml bottle of mango and passion fruit smoothie has a carbon footprint of 209g.
Innocent's co-founder, Richard Reed, questions whether it is fair to compare a bottle of crushed fruit and something largely made of water. Reed's defence highlights a wider issue: how to balance the importance of global warming with other attributes of a product - nutrition, helping poor farmers, careful nurturing of soil, or the welfare of animals. Innocent, for example, donates 10% of profits to charity. "The classical economic response is you implicitly reduce them to a common currency, which leads to money; but my view is these things are just not comparable," said Mike Mason, founder of carbon offset company ClimateCare.
Then there is the issue of what you measure: Coke's cans compare well, but a small glass bottle of the same drink has a footprint of 360g, much higher than Innocent's worst-scoring small bottle of crushed strawberries and bananas (230g).
To resolve these dilemmas, ideas are emerging. Innocent talks of "carbon calories": it calculates that in a world with massively reduced greenhouse gas emissions the average person could afford to eat and drink 2,900g of CO2e each day - and a smoothie would use just 1% of that total.
Mason advocates future labels saying how much carbon is embodied in every pound spent, allowing consumers to compare the impact of anything from a snack to a car.
"Putting an absolute emission on crisps and Aston Martins doesn't tell you very much; using CO2 per pound ... you could grade everything from cars to Coke on the same scale," said Mason.
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