Case study: Carbon labelling

“The first crucial step is to get the data right.”

Paul Bruijn  Safety, Health and Environmental Specialist,
Supply Chain Services Heineken International,  the Netherlands


Exploring the feasibility of carbon labelling

The European Union Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS) sets out seven key priority challenges, including one focused on sustainable consumption and production. SDS emphasises the need to minimise environmental damage and make sustainable use of the earth’s resources. It identifies consumers and the choices they make, as key drivers for sustainable development – emphasising the value that energy labelling, eco-labelling and carbon labelling of products can play in prompting consumers to make sustainable buying decisions.

A carbon label displays the quantified carbon dioxide footprint of the product – defined as the total amount of greenhouse gases (expressed in CO2 equivalents) emitted over the product’s entire life cycle. This footprint can be calculated using the standard for Life Cycle Assessment according to ISO14040.

The environmental team from Heineken Supply Chain have researched ways to find an effective calculation model for our products – based on several factors including packaging, materials, distance to consumer and dispensing methods. The first results of their work show that the carbon footprint for one litre of packed beer varies according to the type of packaging used and the transportation distance covered although we need more accurate input data to be able to calculate the exact numbers of the total footprint.

With such huge variables as transport, supply chain, the sourcing of materials and delivery distances for units of an identical product, the study provides valuable insight into the very real difficulties that must be overcome to provide truly accurate carbon labelling on our brands. This research will continue, with the focus now on sourcing more reliable, validated data, defining our supply chains and identifying carbon footprint ‘range’ figures for our beer products.