Such labelling will be significant on some products - those that are targeted at green aware consumers.

Putting it on soda and MsDonalds is pointless. If you're drinking sodas or McDonalds coffee you're hardly the sort of person that is going to be caring about carbon footprint.

Written in February 2009

And soda of course would get a carbon credit because carbonation takes CO2 out of circulation... until the soda drinker burps.

The industry would want to avoid labelling. That's not because they want to hide anything but because it is almost impossible to do accurately which opens them up to litigation (class action of people who think they've been misled) or silly rule fiddling to gain competitive advantage.

Worse still, you'll get green washers who use carbon offsetting to tell you that they have a zero carbon product, thus making a complete joke of the exercise.

Peter raises an interesting thing in disposal. If a plastic bottle gets recycled then it is zero carbon. If it gets burnt as fuel then it releases carbon (but could be offset against other fuels). If it just gets dumped as garbage then it is a carbon sink (ie. negative carbon). Frankly, I'd rather have the bottle burned up and released into the atmosphere for reabsorbtion than dumped in the ocean.

Organic labelling or fat labelling etc are straight forward when compared to environmental labelling.

Far better is to educate people that various classes of product have various pros and cons.

Written in February 2009

Glycolysis does not use carbon dioxide, so you would not expect the radioactive carbon to be in the products of glycolysis.
http://www.wellnessstarts.com/bellaplex-wrinkle...

Written in April 2011

Interesting idea, however some of the products with the greatest carbon footprints are produce. How could you label a banana? And how could you source a product so accurately as to account for how many times it changes hands?

organicsoul.com

Written in September 2011