Corporate Carbon Reporting: boring but important.
Today BusinessGreen report about Sainsbury’s boss, Justin King’s, fierce opposition to proposals by DECC for mandatory carbon reporting.
I’m going to be honest, on the face of it this is a horrifically boring area. However, in reality it’s quite important. For a company to act effectively on it’s environmental and social impact, it has to know what it is, and forcing companies to find out is a good place to start inspiring action. Puma’s in-depth, full supply chain carbon reporting is evidence to this.
Justin King compared the proposals to food hygiene rules, which he said created “a lot of work for a lot of people without adding to the sum total of human knowledge or equipping consumers to really make choices”.
Here he’s hit the nail on the head. Consumers need to be equipped to make educated choices, and carbon reporting, if done in the right way, could be perfect for this. I imagine being in a supermarket with 5 different brands of baked beans, for example, available, each with a label indicating its carbon cost. If the price difference was marginal, would you opt for the one that had the lowest carbon? Soon it could be easily made into a selling point.
Carbon reporting, if done in the right way, could revolutionise consumer choice. The proposals need to ensure that the carbon footprint is reported not the administrative staff in the company HQ but to the customers and shareholders that make the decisions.
