Finland Has an App Showing Shopping’s Carbon Footprint | Hacker News Reader

Finland Has an App Showing Shopping’s Carbon Footprint

bloomberg.com

75 pointsimartin2k47 comments

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...

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.

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).

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.

Isn't this the same thing as the discussion behind counting the environmental impact at where it's produced versus where it's ordered?

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.

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.

But then the state needs to estimate the carbon emission of every imported good and service.

Nope. Read that comment again. Tax the carbon coming out of the ground. That's easy to measure - it's however many barrels of petroleum or nat gas or coal is being sold. The effects of that tax cascade through the rest of the economy.

You can't tax carbon coming out of the ground in other countries.

If I produce something and emit carbon in a foreign country, then import that thing into your country, you need to make sure that import gets taxed on the emitted carbon. So you need to estimate that emitted carbon.

Your proposal only works if every single country worldwide agrees to tax carbon at the same rate, and effectively applies it.

Levy tariffs against countries that don't tax carbon at the same rate.

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.

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.

No, that's not the case. A carbon tax is effective regardless of the use of the revenue.

> 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?

Hard question to answer. As another datapoint, I did hear from some researcher in a podcast that deliveries are ecologically much worse than going to the store. I've mentioned this on HN a few weeks ago[1], but I'll cite the points for convenience. The original[2] is in Flemish, so any translation mistakes are on me. These were the reasons given for why ordering packages is less ecological:

- Many disparate products moved to many individual homes (many to many makes for a lot of 'movements', fragmentation)

- 15-20% of people is not home during a delivery attempt (useless impact)

- Returns are equally bad (people order 8 pairs of shoes knowing they'll send 7 back)

- Different delivery companies cause even more fragmentation (driving to the same home)

If I remember correctly (I didn't watch/listen it back anymore since 24 days), there wasn't really a question about it -- at least in Belgium -- that ordering is worse. Like, no exceptions were mentioned if I remember correctly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21373578

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRqKEK_xJvc

Amazon actually keep their carbon footprint secret. They have a vague plan to have half their shipping and AWS be fully green by 2030, during which time AWS alone will net about another hundred billion dollars in profit. The secrecy and their laggard response despite immense profits does not make me optimistic about their carbon footprint today.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/25/amazon-carbon-f...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/19/amazon-...

Wait, half their shipping green by 2030? That's both too little and too late.

If it had been fully green in 2025 or so... they easily make enough profit to at least fund compensation programs (like Climeworks' recapturing) for the part of CO2 that is currently required for flying the planes (since there is not yet a practical alternative to flying fuel-based planes, that's one area where compensation currently makes sense given that emission can't be avoided).

If you're getting into these kinds of considerations for Amazon packages, you should consider the added transportation and re-packaging they go through:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/14/20961523/amazon-walmart-...

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.

A real CO2 tax would handle the calculation difficulties automatically, by allowing the market to propagate the cost of carbon through the supply network. A browser plugin would have to know everything about the supply chain in order to compute that number itself.

A real CO2 tax would need to compute that number for every imported good or service.

Yes, a country should tax imported goods based on exporter co2 emissions.

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?

Making something with less impact takes more effort. Filters/knowledge you name it, does not come cheap. It is not the amount of resources it is the process of turning resource into product.

A cotton sweater is cheap. But if you want to make cotton sweater in a greener process, then you need water cleaning systems, maybe different paint (which is also more expensive).

No, we're not paying the cost on the impact on the climate of our products. We're basically borrowing / stealing this from the future, the poor and the commons.

No, as the cost of actions/methods/waste/materials of production aren’t always captured, the driving down of costs through competition actually encourages the discovery of externalities (ways to externalise the cost/impact onto others/environment/public good), “efficiencies” aren’t always net wins but a movement of negative impacts away from the production of a good/service.

Sorry if you already know this, but basic capitalism as practiced does not capture the full cost of things, if one believes that pollution or climate change or exhausting shared natural resources (something like government giving water away for free to corporate entities to resell in bottles) are things that should be accounted for in cost https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/basics/external.h...

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.

Except that highly-paid people have a right to resources, which they often invoke by buying lots of stuff.

> 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.)

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

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.

> If something is cheaper, doesn’t it mean it took less resources to make it and therefore is the greener option?

Yes, that is mostly correct, but only if you are comparing products made in the same country.

Whoever builds a simple user experience for something so complicated will hopefully end up being the next google. There is a sore need for 'woke' consumers all over the world for the true future cost of their purchases. At this point money is no longer the sole facet of cost.

> Buy local.

That would be counter productive. Buy local would increase your CO2 emissions. Local might have other benefits, but Co2 is not one of them.

Shipping uses FAR less Co2 than you might imagine.

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...

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 - whether we manage to make a splash or not, I hope it's the start of a long career building software for sustainability.

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.

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?

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"

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

https://outline.com/98X43P

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... 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-...

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

[2] https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

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

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

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... and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=559...

Thanks!

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

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