'Frustrated' Tesco ditches eco-labels

Tesco will no longer feature the Carbon Trust’s carbon reduction label on its products, claiming it is too time-consuming and expensive to justify.

The supermarket giant has also told of its frustration that other leading retailers failed to follow its lead, which meant the label was unable to gain sufficient critical mass.

When it launched four years ago, in conjunction with the Carbon Trust, Tesco’s Carbon Reduction Labelling plan was hailed by then CEO Sir Terry Leahy as the start of a “revolution in green consumption”.

However, Tesco told The Grocer it had decided to wind down the project after finding research for each product involved “a minimum of several months’ work”.

“We expected that other retailers would move quickly to do it as well, giving it critical mass, but that hasn’t happened,” said Tesco’s climate change director, Helen Fleming.

About 1,100 products have been researched by the retailer with 500 products having labels in Tesco stores.

But Fleming said the lack of uptake by other retailers had failed to make the scheme viable.

“There are an enormous amount of companies that research the carbon footprints of their products,” she said. “But how do you ramp that up to the top level? We now need to make the right long-term decision and we’re talking about what we do next.”

Meanwhile PepsiCo, whose Walkers brand also pioneered the use of carbon footprint labelling, said it too had been disappointed at the uptake of the scheme, but pledged to continue.

“Although we’ve not seen the take-up we’d like, we still support carbon labelling as a way of helping consumers and businesses understand and reduce emissions,” said Martyn Seal, European director for sustainability at PepsiCo.

Other retailers defended their decisions to discard footprint labelling. The Co-operative Group said it had completed research on 15 products after developing a tool with Manchester University two years ago but had decided it was impractical for mass use.