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Food labels typically include fat content, carbohydrate content, calorific content etc, however many consumers are interested in the environmental impact assoicated with getting that product to the shelf/home.
Therefore 3 new mandatory metrics on food:
Distance it's travelled to get to you
: (5 star for local > 1 star for 15,000km)
Availability : can anyone obtain this (5 stars for 'universally' available e.g. rice, 1 for 'ridiculously western' foods like new flavour skittles)
Sustainability : if everyone ate this product, how many people could the planet sustain (5 stars for 6bn or fewer > 1 star for 2bn or fewer)
I'm not suggesting these metrics would be easy to work out, but I for one would like to know.
(p.s. this labelling could be expanded to everything.. which would be a nice touch.. especially for label manufacturers).
footprints
http://www.myfootprint.org
work out your own footprint [neilp, Oct 04 2004]
(?) Relentless Footprint Tracking
http://www.halfbake...ootprint_20Tracking
[Shz, Oct 04 2004]
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Annotation:
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Eco-balderdash. All those features are already reflected in the price. |
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Why yes DrCurry, persuasive point. American petrol ('gas') is of course so much more eco-friendly, which explains its cheaper price. |
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...OK so its not a food... |
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Loris: if you're drinking petrol, you've got more serious problems than can be dealt with in an annotation. |
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"Availability : can anyone obtain this (5 stars for 'universally' available e.g. rice, 1 for 'ridiculously western' foods like new flavour skittles)"
What about ridiculously eastern foods? Ridiculously Finnish foods? Ridiculously Brazilian foods? Ridiculously Maltese foods? Ridiculously Indian foods? Ridiculously Australian foods? |
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Another datum that is simple and fairly objectively verifiable...gross weight (including package). Gross weight minus net weight should be package weight. We may wish to minimize package weight. I don't know whether minimization of this parameter should be a high priority. |
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This strikes me more as a campaign to entice domestic purchasing, on 'patriotic' grounds. |
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[UB] nah it's not. it's a plan to make people aware of the environmental costs of their consumption. It just makes sense for us not to shift lots of product around the world when for a lot of goods there is a local alternative.
I'm a big fan of proper free trade, but it's a balancing act. |
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There's a big push to do this type of thing in the field of architecture. Building materials are measured in what's called 'embodied energy' which attempts to take into account the cost of producing, supplying, etc... each building material.
I remember the charts my professor showed us in class that had sand and concrete relatively low, recycled aluminum and wood sheathing somewhere in the middle, and paint and expensive materials such as copper with an extremely high embodied energy. |
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I'm not sure if they were measured in any specific units or just relative... and there isn't a complete and thorough listing yet, or I'd have found a website link to post, but I'm sure some graduate research students are working on it somewhere. |
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Add to Treon's list one more metric:
Sustainability of natural resources
consumed to produce the product,
weighted by percentage of content. If
taxes were imposed on products based
upon these three metrics, the world would
be a better place. |
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If I could eat without paying any taxes, the world would be a better place. |
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Environmental Footprint Labelling? |
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- I actually envisioned a gigantic pair of lizard's shoes with "Godzilla woz 'ere" embossed on the sole. |
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