Coming soon to a store near you: carbon labels

We're all familiar with food labels that detail calories, carbohydrates and fat content. Now there's a push to add labels that detail a product’s carbon footprint. Organizations that certify companies’ carbon math and offer the labels have been cropping up across the globe.

“When I spoke to the Carbon Trust here in the U.K.,” said WIRED UK commissioning editor Oliver Franklin-Wallis, “they said that the demand for this has just gone crazy in the last 18 months, both from consumers and from companies who now see it as a competitive advantage to be seen to be taking action on the climate crisis.”

Franklin-Wallis recently wrote about the trend and said the idea, which has been around for many years, is also taking off because it’s gotten easier to calculate a product’s carbon footprint. He used a carton of eggs as an example.

"It is actually quite complicated because it's not just, you know, the trucks that you're delivering the eggs in. It's the feed of the chickens. It's heating the housing that they're going into. It's, you know, all sorts of packaging,” Franklin-Wallis said. “More recently, the science of calculating carbon footprints has come a long way.”

Industries now have standardized calculations and share data.

To hear more about carbon labels, click play on the audio player above.