
Finland Has an App Showing Shopping’s Carbon Footprint - imartin2k
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/finland-has-an-app-that-reveals-shopping-s-true-carbon-footprint
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frereubu
While I think change has to come from both consumers and producers, this kind
of gimmick (an interesting gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless) puts too much
of the burden on consumers and feels like tinkering around the edges of the
real issues. It feeds into a model where the emitters don't take direct
responsibility for their emissions, where it's easier to calculate, and pass
the costs on down through the supply chain, as other commenters have noted.

It's rather like the successful campaign of companies to push the burden of
disposable rubbish onto consumers instead of changing the system:
[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/more-
recyc...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/more-recycling-
wont-solve-plastic-pollution/)

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Mirioron
But without consumers these goods wouldn't be produced in the first place.
Companies themselves rarely consume resources, people do. Regulating producers
is easier, but ultimately all of it still depends on the consumers.

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dmbass
The sentiment is that goods should be produced sustainably instead of
unsustainably or not at all. Obviously consumers gonna consume whatever is
available to them (that's why they are called consumers).

~~~
Mirioron
But consumers are _not_ consuming whatever is available to them. You don't
create a product without knowing that somebody would want to buy it. Consumers
do make choices. Perhaps some kind of labeling for how environmentally
friendly a product and its packaging are? Kind of like calorie content
labeling. Eg some estimate of X amount of carbon to produce, package,
transport the goods based on country of origin, transport method, raw
materials and packaging.

If you try to force producers to take all the burden and blame (like many
people are) then you'll just get lied to. People are generally unwilling to
accept responsibility for these kinds of things without there being
overwhelming evidence.

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notafraudster
I am interested in this but a little skeptical we can pin down the carbon
economics. I think about this a lot in my own life. I'm in a major US metro. I
buy most of my non-food stuff online on Amazon. I could drive my hybrid to a
Target (~5 mile round trip) instead. My sense is my hybrid is slightly more
efficient in raw carbon emissions than an Amazon delivery truck, but I live an
apartment building, so the average Amazon delivery driver drops off 20 or 30
packages as part of a route that probably has hundreds of packages, so
probably marginally Amazon has a lot less carbon load for the last leg than me
going to Target? Since Amazon has a staging warehouse in my city, I assume the
carbon profile up until the last leg is similar (although maybe Amazon
populates that warehouse with air shipping instead of ground shipping, who
knows for sure).

But then Amazon also uses a bunch of packaging. The cardboard packaging is
putatively recyclable, except for the collapse of paper/cardboard recycling in
the US last year. I still recycle it, but it's probably being landfilled. The
plastic packaging is just landfill waste. And even if the cardboard was being
recycled, there's a huge water burden involved in the production of recycled
paper products as I imagine it, so trading off carbon emissions versus local
water consumption / drought risk seems like a problem.

If someone made a website or app that allowed me to visualize all this for
each purchase I make, I think that would be mondo cool -- and as dsalzman's
comment to this thread mentions, this could be an opportunity to tie into a
carbon offset service or something else to automatically compensate, at least
partially, for the efficiency gap.

Come to think of it, that leads to another cost I hadn't considered before: at
least theoretically, the money I save on Amazon frees up money for offsets or
environmentally friendly donations versus paying more elsewhere. (Although in
practice my total donations per year come nowhere close to what I save).

I'd also be curious today whether picking slower shipping on Amazon reduces or
increases the carbon burden of the transaction versus prime shipping versus
faster shipping.

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zacherates
This is actually the beauty of a carbon tax. Instead of trying to figure out
all the costs, you tax pumping the carbon out of the ground and then let the
prices flow through the economy.

That way you don't have to try to figure it out as an individual you just end
up comparing Amazon's delivery prices to a tank of gas, which you're doing
anyway because you already have to manage your own budget.

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jmole
A carbon tax is only effective for climate/carbon mitigation if the tax
revenue is reserved for those kinds of efforts - which historically has been
difficult to achieve.

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davidw
That doesn't make sense. A carbon tax works because it makes more carbon-
intensive activities/goods relatively more expensive compared with less
carbon-intensive activities/goods, so you're giving people a financial
incentive to use less of it.

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dsalzman
I’ve been wanting something like this! A browser plugin that would add a Co2
tax to products. The aim being to nudge shoppers to realize the hidden costs
of cheap goods that are shipped at great distances. Buy local. Buy for life.

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thepangolino
This is something that always puzzled me. If something is cheaper, doesn’t it
mean it took less resources to make it and therefore is the greener option?

~~~
whatshisface
Software consultants are one counterexample, because they are very expensive
but also environmentally friendly. Human labor has the biggest difference
between price and resource consumption that I can think of.

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ars
> Human labor is very environmentally friendly

No it is not. For example a meat eating human produces more CO2 per mile than
a regular car. (Although most people could use the exercise so don't use that
info in isolation.)

~~~
jdnenej
That only matters if you plan to kill people who aren't working.

~~~
ars
No, I don't mean baseline, I mean extra CO2 emitted by a human riding a
bicycle.

Again, many people need exercise so this might just replace that. But if you
exert extra, then you need extra food. Food costs CO2, and humans are not very
efficient.

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jmhakala
Title is slightly misleading. The app is incoming in spring 2020 [1]. Also it
requires merchants to opt-in on it, probably for a fee. So adoption is not
exactly slam dunk.

Also, I live in Finland and work in ecommerce, never heard of this before.

[1] [https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/34819/finnish-
fintech-e...](https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/34819/finnish-fintech-
enfuce-to-track-co2e-emissions-of-purchases)

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brendanmc6
I think this is a neat idea and I hope it makes local and renewable powered
goods more attractive to consumers (and ultimately, businesses).

Though I often wonder why climate tech is so obsessed with super-accurate and
granular carbon calculations. You see this as a value proposition in all kinds
of apps and startups for everything from travel to food.

It's pretty clear by now that simply telling someone they emitted 1,333.33
kilograms of co2 is not enough to influence behavior. You can much more
quickly estimate your average emissions and spend the rest of your energy
finding a good way to offset it.

At least this sort of thinking inspired the work I've done so far on
[https://offsetra.com](https://offsetra.com) \- whether we manage to make a
splash or not, I hope it's the start of a long career building software for
sustainability.

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zaospace
I don’t think carbon footprint should be seen in isolation.

The agriculture export economy has large carbon footprints—for your favorite
fruits such as avocados, apples and citrus—and an important factor is how
these sales impact local economies.

Some countries and regions that would otherwise be stagnant rely on this.

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bradlys
How are they going to do this through integration with credit cards if most
payments are just charging an amount and not telling you the contents of the
purchase?

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tuukkah
The shop knows what items it sold in the transaction and the card issuer knows
who the buyer was: "it combines data from credit cards and banks with purchase
data from retailers"

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chrisseaton
‘True carbon footprint’? It’s just another estimate.

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neonate
[https://outline.com/98X43P](https://outline.com/98X43P)

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dmytton
It's great to see new services that help consumers make choices about the
products they buy. However, without details of the methodology being used to
determine the carbon footprint, there is no way to gauge the accuracy of the
service. These types of analysis are often quite inaccurate.

The Bloomberg article is paywalled. Their press release at
[https://enfuce.com/enfuce-launched-new-sustainability-
servic...](https://enfuce.com/enfuce-launched-new-sustainability-service/)
says:

> My Carbon Action is based on a validated calculation method called Life
> Cycle Assessment (LCA), which has been developed together with D-mat, a
> Finnish consultancy experienced in lifestyle carbon and material footprint
> calculations. The calculation takes into account the environmental impacts
> of a product’s entire lifecycle from raw-material extraction, manufacturing
> and transport to use and disposal.

This is good but it doesn't actually say what the "validated" LCA is.

Consumer supply chains are notoriously complex. You need details of every
element of the supply chain for every product to be able to properly calculate
the LCA. This is why we get things like the assumption that local produce
always has lower carbon emissions, which isn't always true[1], or switching
from plastic bags to organic cotton totes, which are worse on many
environmental measures[2].

This is a very complex area[3] and Enfuce need to release their methodology to
demonstrate that their data is accurate. Lack of transparency of data is a
major problem with sustainability claims of all kinds, something I wrote about
this week at [https://davidmytton.blog/sustainability-doesnt-work-
without-...](https://davidmytton.blog/sustainability-doesnt-work-without-
transparency/)

[1]
[https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7679.2009.00445.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7679.2009.00445.x)

[2]
[https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...](https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf)

[3]
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-015-9591-6](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-015-9591-6)

~~~
RobinL
Do you have any recommendations for good sources of data on energy embodied in
consumer goods? I've been making a little calculator but have foubd it almost
impossible to find trustworthy sources of evidence on this
[https://robinl.github.io/robinlinacre/energy-
usage](https://robinl.github.io/robinlinacre/energy-usage)

~~~
dmytton
You need to get it from the vendor so it's really up to them if they publish
LCAs for their products. Apple and Microsoft do for their hardware but I've
not seen many other companies do so.

E.g.
[https://www.apple.com/euro/environment/pdf/a/generic/product...](https://www.apple.com/euro/environment/pdf/a/generic/products/notebooks/13-inch_MacBookAir_w_Retina_PER_June2019.pdf)
and [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=559...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=55974)

~~~
RobinL
Thanks!

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billiam
This feature if functional and accurate would immediately get both sides of my
payment business. You listening, Stripe and Square?

