What will the future food “environmental score” look like?

• A future “environmental score” will aim to guide the French in the choice of food that respects the environment, according to our partner The Conversation.

• Real demand from consumers, progress in measurement methodologies and the appearance of new digital players make this indicator essential.

• This analysis was conducted by Vincent Colomb, expert in environmental assessment and eco-design – food chains at Ademe (Ecological Transition Agency).

The law relating to the fight against food waste and the circular economy, voted in 2020, provides in its article 15 for the design and implementation of an environmental labeling system on food products.

A project taken up by article 2 of the climate and resilience law of August 22, 2021.

Nutriscore logo © en.openfoodfacts.org CC0

After the NutriScore, which informs consumers about the nutritional quality of products, the environmental score aims to guide the French in choosing food that respects the environment, from all points of view.

In the wake of the vote on the law, an experiment was coordinated by a steering committee made up of the Ecological Transition Agency and the three ministries concerned (ecological transition; agriculture and food; economy, finance and recovery), using a call for projects inviting private actors to propose an environmental labeling methodology.

18 projects have been launched over the past two years, as well as other initiatives developed in parallel.

Thus arose the PlanetScore, the Ecoscore, or the Global Rating.

All are interesting, but all also have shortcomings.

Climate and Resilience logo © David Grandmougin CC-BY

An independent Scientific Council has been set up to identify the scientific bases of environmental labeling initiatives and assess their potential impact on consumers.

Its opinion was given to the steering committee, which relied on it to build its own report, recently submitted to Parliament and the Senate.

The final objective is to establish recommendations to build, by 2023, a reliable, readable and fair official indicator.

​Consumers in demand

For a long time, the issue of environmental labeling was difficult to address.

The lack of data, the difficulty of building a robust life cycle analysis and the reluctance of companies made the exercise tricky.

From now on, demand from consumers, progress in measurement methodologies and the appearance of new digital players make this indicator essential.

Changing behaviors for sustainability…myths and reality https://t.co/QE1nNFUDub

— The Conversation France (@FR_Conversation) December 10, 2016

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It aims to help consumers integrate the environmental dimension into their food choices in two respects: on the one hand, to distinguish within the same category of foodstuffs with the best environmental performance according to the mode of production, processing and distribution;

and to perceive between two categories of food the most virtuous, in order to contribute to changing the consumer's diet – for example by favoring legumes over meat.

One can imagine the difficulty of constructing such an indicator: what environmental issues should be integrated?

What data to use and how?

Which impact assessment methods?

What score and in what format?

​Three levels of precision

Because environmental labeling has a cost in the face of which companies are not all equal, it emerges from the work that three levels of description will be possible.

A first level, accessible to all at low cost, will start from the public Agribalyse database, which gives values ​​for 2,800 generic products (yogurt or pasta, for example) and 500 agricultural products representative of dietary diversity.

From there, the distributor will refine with a few easily accessible parameters: the actual recipe of his product, the packaging, the origin of the ingredients, the mode of production (organic, conventional, etc.).

Such a value should be accessible at less than 5 euros per reference and deployable on a large scale.

Plastics: the delicate question of the "life cycle" of packaging https://t.co/sjhny6MHjm pic.twitter.com/NoNuGKVGl7

— The Conversation France (@FR_Conversation) November 18, 2020

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A second level, which some companies may choose to adopt, will integrate more details, with about ten parameters depending on the sector – for example the diet or access to pasture of the cow that produced the milk sold.

More expensive information to collect, but interesting from an environmental point of view.

The third level will integrate the complete life cycle analysis, going even more into detail: we can specify, for example, the distance between the farm and the dairy or the manure storage method.

We gain in precision, but the costs increase sharply, reaching up to 10,000 euros per reference.

Also only the most motivated and those who "have the means" will be able to reach this level of precision.

​A global methodology

To measure these impacts, life cycle analysis is preferred, and within the reference framework recognized at European level of the

(aggregates several impacts on air, water, soil, etc.) – to which some adjustments will be made.

Because the current framework does not fully take into account important elements for the food sector, such as the greater biodiversity in organic farming plots compared to conventional.

Such an analysis is constructed by following two steps: quantifying the emissions of pollutants and the uses of resources for all stages of the product's life cycle;

then group pollutant emissions and resource uses into a limited number of environmental impacts.

Beyond the PEF, the construction of environmental indicators must therefore be completed on 5 main axes as a priority: the toxicity or ecotoxicity of the product, the storage of carbon in the soil, local biodiversity, packaging and the contribution to the overfishing for seafood.

And if we generalized the environmental display?

https://t.co/diDwVJggGP pic.twitter.com/pCN1C9nHfl

– The Conversation France (@FR_Conversation) September 17, 2019

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Two ways are possible to make these adjustments: either by integrating them as much as possible into the logic of the LCA or by making external adjustments, once the LCA has been calculated, through a bonus-malus system, as did PlanetScore and Ecoscore each in their own way.

This 2nd option is not favored by the 2 reports, because the labels concern only a part or a stage of the life cycle, and the application of an overall bonus is therefore not rigorous.

For example, an “organic bonus” to fill the limits of LCA should only concern one stage of the life cycle (agricultural production) and only certain environmental aspects such as toxicity – but not GHG emissions.

Also, it is recommended not to multiply the indicators complementary to the PEF in order to avoid double counting, to respect the perimeters between indicators and the weightings in the final score (for example between climate impact and biodiversity).

The risk being ultimately to unjustifiably affect the score of certain products.

Other information on non-environmental aspects, such as working conditions or animal welfare, may be added, but separated from the environmental score itself.

​The score and the form of the display

Finally, what should the score look like?

As is the case for household appliances, a letter (A, B, C, D, E, F, etc.) will make it possible to assess the environmental quality of the product compared to the other categories.

In this transversal display, plants will necessarily emerge more virtuous than animal products: an organic fruit, even overpackaged and coming from the other side of the world, will logically be assigned a more advantageous letter than a beef steak.

In order to obtain a finer analysis than the 5 or 6 letters, a note out of 100 could complete the system and facilitate analysis within the same category: 2 chicken meats could have the same letter "C", a with a score of 60/100 and the other of 70/100, in order to value the meat of better environmental impact compared to another.

Then, 3 sub-scores will specify the a priori impact of the product on the climate, biodiversity and resources.

VIDEO:

Visually, the results of the experiment recommend an “interpretative, synthetic and colorful” display so that it has an effect on the consumer.

Certain foods, on which data is lacking, could be excluded from the system, such as powdered meals.

The official score, tomorrow on the packaging?

The official score will therefore not correspond to one of the existing projects, but will make a synthesis between the proposals, based on the recommendations of the Scientific Council.

Before it is fully operational, work must be carried out for about a year to finalize and test the calculation method.

Our "CONSUMPTION" file

Beyond the technical and computational aspects, this work has largely mobilized professionals and NGOs and made it possible to question the notion of "environmental performance" in the food sector.

The discussions were rich, sometimes sensitive, raising questions of transparency, access to data and objectification of existing environmental claims.

There is no doubt that the debate will continue, particularly on a European scale where French work is watched with attention.

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This analysis was written by Vincent Colomb, expert in environmental assessment and eco-design – food chains at Ademe (Ecological Transition Agency).

The original article was published on The Conversation website.

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