New way to know if your shoes or swiss cheese are sustainable?

We want to know what is in our food. What about all of the other products we consume? Consumer interest in sustainability is is starting to take the same path as food labeling has. It makes sense given the legal mandates and inexorable tendency toward transparency and digital traceability in supply chains. Food and other products are revealing their environmental, social, and economic footprints. Like certifications or eco-labels before them, consumers may use the information to make more informed choices.

Claire Moses writes in the NY Times that the trend may have begun with a British knitwear company in 2019 and is now spreading. In my view, two factors have now emerged to make it feasible: tech and standardized metrics.

In the past, understanding the provenance of ingredients from around the world was very difficult due to inadequate paper records and unregulated trading systems that obscured origins and that did not record anything other than transactional exchanges, if that. Now with an array of traceability software and hardware including RFID tags and microchips, the supply chains that bring goods to us are more and more visible. These information systems can also pack a lot more information about quality, standards, date stamps, suppliers included, labor data, carbon footprint, even conditions of production. That is all being driven first by commercial demand to better manage supply and second by the increasing emergence of legislation, especially in the EU and the US that mandate traceability. Our work with many global companies suggests that adoption is imminent and their efforts will thus cascade to many smaller sub-suppliers, potentially changing our understanding of foods and many other products. It helps that the costs of doing so are plummeting. Companies can fully track supplies for a small fraction of what it cost just 5 years ago, even across complex chains and into remote countries.

But traceability is just the mechanism, what is even more important to this trend is the content: what is being measured and reported. The key to successful content is standardized data. But more than standardized, it must be science-based to be functional and credible. Standardized data, facilitates both measurement and reporting and thus keeps costs low. Imagine having different ways of calculating calories or nutrition; labels would be meaningless. There is, as yet, little regulation in the content area aside from food safety laws, but there are credible data standards that have emerged, especially for agrifood products, and an increasing array of consumer goods. Those standards and their indicators are being used to understand sustainability and can be adapted to labelling purposes.

This is different than corporate reporting about practices or about compliance such as the Global Reporting Initiative or GlobalGAP. The idea is to inform with precision while differentiating. But there are challenges for this to work.

First, we do not yet have sufficient standardization. While there is widespread adoption of key sustainability metrics that could be reported - COSA being just one - a single dominant standard has not yet emerged. Second, without standard guidelines, the reporting or labeling is bound to be inconsistent at best. And without effective regulatory teeth to ensure credibility and accountability, greenwashing is likely to occur at such a scale that the endeavor will probably fail to gain consumer trust.

Currently, we have some ecological and social certifications with clear public standards that provide some of these collective features and convey those with a consumer label such as Organic, Rainforest Alliance, FairTrade, GoodWeave, and Forest Stewardship Council. Their relative public transparency is valuable and any new reporting system will need transparent accountability to meet a necessary level of credibility and trust. But consumers appear ready even just noting their overwhelming preference to know if foods include GMOs and that many use current food ingredient labels to make informed choices. Assuming we have the courage to be informed, it should not be that difficult to achieve, although it will take a few years to get it right.