Customers buying Timberland shoes now have something to think about other than style, comfort and price: global warming.
The New Hampshire-based company’s fall collection includes a gray fabric sneaker, priced at $49.99, and a wool-lined leather clog for $105. A close look at the labels reveals, however, that the clog is a bargain when it comes to greenhouse gases that cause global warming: 66 pounds of carbon dioxide and other gases were emitted in producing the clog, compared with 88 pounds for the sneaker.
Timberland is among a growing number of companies seeking to capitalize on consumers’ growing concern about climate change by developing “carbon labels” for everything from shoes to shampoo.
Though mostly in use in the United Kingdom, the labels are gaining ground in this country. Timberland is the first in the United States to place the tags on store shelves, and major corporations like PepsiCo and Wal-Mart are conducting inventories of their products’ carbon emissions and considering labeling merchandise.
But climate experts say today’s complex, transnational supply chains make it challenging to accurately assess a product’s carbon footprint — the total emissions generated during production and transportation. And no national standard exists to verify such assertions.
Timberland ranks its shoes on a climate-impact scale of 0 (less than 5.5 pounds of greenhouse gases emitted) to 10 (220 pounds or more emitted). That information appears on shoe tags and leaflets inside shoeboxes, and is combined with data about resource consumption and chemical use to calculate a shoe’s overall Green Index rating.
“With all the media attention around environmental issues, people are noticing that their lives are affected by environmental ills and they really have the purchasing power to make a difference,” said Betsy Blaisdell, manager of environmental stewardship for Timberland. “Hopefully this will become a competitive advantage for companies who are aggressively demonstrating a reduction in their carbon footprint.”
But does it affect sales?
Some marketing specialists doubt the labels will drive consumer choices, other than among a small percentage of people who are committed environmentalists.
“There’s certainly a heightened awareness for these issues because of all the media attention and notoriety of such films as ‘An Inconvenient Truth,'” said Blaine Becker, director of marketing for the Hartman Group, a market research firm that focuses on natural products. “But when it comes down to how all of this translates into purchasing behavior, there’s still a long way to go.” Carbon emissions are too abstract a concept to resonate with most consumers, he said.
For now, customers will have to trust Timberland that the information on the label is accurate: Rankings are computed in-house using a complex formula that measures everything from the amount of leather in a shoe to the energy used by a particular factory. But Timberland is trying to recruit other companies to develop a standardized method for verifying carbon emissions, and is discussing the issue with outdoor apparel companies including Nike, The North Face and REI.
Calculating carbon emissions is simple enough when you’re talking about buying a tank of gas, said Jonathan Pershing, director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, which developed a widely recognized method for companies to figure their overall greenhouse gas emissions. But it gets tricky for a more complex product, such as a pair of jeans.
“You have to ask, Where was that pair of jeans made?” Pershing said. “Was it made with hand labor or a machine, and what was powering the machine? Where did the cotton come from, the United States or Egypt? If it was from Egypt, was it grown with an irrigation system or [rainwater]? All of a sudden, the analysis becomes, at the moment, beyond what we can do.”
A small but growing number of consulting businesses have formed to help companies cope with these challenges. Many rely on industry averages to make their calculations, or concentrate only on the manufacturing process and ignore pollution caused by obtaining raw materials and by distribution. Transportation, in particular, poses a difficulty; a last-minute decision to ship a product by air rather than over ground can dramatically boost emissions.
The process is so complicated that British grocer Tesco has pledged $10 million to establish a think tank to help figure out the best way to calculate carbon labels for all the products it carries. Meanwhile, the British government is supporting pilot projects by three companies including Walkers potato chips, a PepsiCo subsidiary that became the first company to place carbon labels on all its products earlier this year. The goal is to establish a national, independently verified carbon label, said Euan Murray, carbon footprint manager at the Carbon Trust, the government-funded non-profit that is running the effort.
Murray said more than 100 companies, many of them multinationals, have expressed interest in participating in the program, which requires them to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions each year.
Nicki Lyons, a spokeswoman for PepsiCo United Kingdom, said the labeling effort has helped the company take steps to reduce its carbon footprint.
Easier-to-store potatoes
For example, the company discovered that more carbon was emitted in farming the potatoes for the chips (44 percent) than in manufacturing or transporting them (30 and 9 percent), Lyons said. As a result, it asked farmers to produce potatoes with less moisture, which require less energy to store.
Although there is no comparable government-sponsored effort in the United States, several major companies are gathering information about carbon emissions in their supply chains, information that may one day show up on labels. Computer company Dell now requires all its suppliers to publicly report their emissions and work to reduce them. Wal-Mart this year hired consultants to calculate the carbon emissions created by several of its products.
Browsing through a Timberland store recently, Tim Horgan of Westborough, Mass., said he would consider making a purchase because it caused fewer carbon emissions. “That might be the thing that tipped me over the edge if I was trying to decide, do I buy that shoe or keep looking,” he said.
But Jorge Iberico, shopping while on vacation from Peru, disagreed. “The first thing I’m going to think about is if I like them and how comfortable they are, and the last thing will be the environment,” he said.
