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Persil whiter than white but sweets come unstuck in green index
Sri Carmichael, Consumer Affairs Reporter27.08.09
A new “eco-index” charting the environmental impact of Britain's favourite groceries has crowned Persil laundry powder the greenest supermarket product and Haribo sweets the worst.
Researchers evaluated 100 products on a range of green issues, including packaging, airmiles, fairtrade ingredients, use of energy and resources and how clear the company's environmental policy was to shoppers.
Persil, which is owned by Unilever, came top of the league for “taking steps to minimise the environmental impact of every aspect of the product's life”, according to the scoring system devised by environmental consultancy EnvirUP.
Another of the company's brands, PG Tips, came second for responsibly sourcing tea and green packaging that provided detailed information on carbon targets.
A box of Quality Street sweets, with its compostable packaging, also made the green top 10.
Haribo came bottom because the researchers said the company appeared to have no environmental policy and did “nothing to demonstrate it understands its environmental impact”.
Muller yoghurts came second from bottom for “lack of environmental thinking in delivering products, no consideration of carbon emissions or environmental labelling”.
The EnvirUP Green Index Report uses 48 questions to cover all areas of environmental sustainability and the overall score was linked to an A to G grade, similar to the energy performance of domestic appliances. None of the brands was judged to be green enough to achieve A and B grades overall.
EnvirUP found all the brands performed particularly badly on packaging, with over 60 per cent of products scoring grades E to G. Researchers said Pringles crisps were the worst because their foil-coated cardboard tubes are impossible to recycle.
The greenest soft drink was Volvic, while Pepsi ranked higher than Coca Cola because of proactive green policies.
Redbull lost its wings at number 91 because it does not have any environmental initiatives beyond recycling the can.
Pet owners were advised to choose Bakers and Felix ahead of Pedigree and Whiskas because of over-packaging.
EnvirUP founder Assim Ishaque said: “Consumers are more interested in a product's green credentials nowadays. Many brands have caught on to the green' trend but some have clearly missed the demand.”
Winners and sinners in the eco-stakes
Top 10
1. Persil Laundry
2. PG Tips
3. Finish
4. Volvic
5. Kellogg's Special K
6. Surf
7. Ribena
8. Quality Street
9. Ariel
10. Evian
Bottom 10
91. Red Bull
92. Clover Spreads
93. Richmond Sausages
94. John West Canned Fish
95. Warburtons
96. Young's Chilled Fish
97. Cathedral City
98. Muller Corner
99. Muller Light
100. Haribo Gums & Jellies
Reader views (13)
The value of a survey like this is to give manufacturers and retailers a kick up the rear when it comes to the environmental impact of their products. It's about consumer power - and long may it reign! If they know that their customers are watching what they do and care about these issues, then they will be prompted to do something about it. I can imagine the companies at the bottom of the list scrambling round for answers about why they 'failed' in this list. No survey will be perfect - it's difficult to truly compare detergents with yoghurt and some can hide poor performance with slick responses or selective statistics. BUT the more questions we ask, the more aware we are of how to use our buying power to endorse or penalise brands for their corporate values, the better off we are.
- Georgina, London
And the electricity to power those trains come from:
A - Nuclear power stations in France, (with all the problems of disposing of nuclear waste).
B - Coal and gas fired power stations in England, (with all their juicy CO2 emissions and other pollutants).
C - Pixie Dust fired power stations, (whose emissions include rainbows and butterflies).
Or
D - Answers A and B, but we'd all like think it's C because we can't see the problem directly...
- John, London
David says to "wield your ignorance in the direction of something that truly deserves it", but how can we know what deserves it if we're all ignorant?
I think the point everyone's trying to make is that the survey is utter rubbish as it's too narrow in what it actually looked for, if you consider the wider "green" implications then these products aren't at all green, so it deludes people into buying green when they're actually not. Perhaps you should reserve calling everyone else ignorant until the scales fall from your own eyes?
- Bob, Cheam
So Bob from Cheam and Nick from London, are you sure that water from France arrives by lorry?
My information is that is moves to the UK by rail through the Channel Tunnel by ELECTRIC train....
- Tom Watson, Leicester
Whats with the anti-evian campaign? I bought the report earlier and I think it covers more aspects than just transport. Did you guys read the report before you bought it? I will try and finish the rest of it today. So far I am impressed with the look of it and the cheeky writing style.
- Wayne, England
David from Surrey, please consider yourself one of the 'idiots' you kindly labelled everyone else while you're at it, (and feel free to add pompous to your 'ignorant' list).
If people wish to eat Haribo sweets then those sweets have to be produced and shipped in from somewhere - whereas if people wish to drink water then the most environmentally sound solution is to drink that which falls from the sky above their heads, is filtered locally, and then piped to their taps.
Having it put into pretty little plastic bottles and then driven 1000 miles to their supermarket, where they will then drive it home can not be, in any logical sense, environmentally 'green'.
The fact that companies like Evian and Volvic make enough profit to employ departments of PR people to come up with 'creative' answers to a set of spurious questions still misses the bigger picture: Which is that their 'thinner' bottles and 'greener' inks, (or whatever they won on) are all completely redundant and unnecessary in the first place!
The whole list is a nonsense anyway. How on earth do you 'fairly' compare chemical washing agents with tea with cheese?
If it's not a like-for-like comparison it's not a worthwhile one.
- John, London
Bottled water in the top-10 surely makes this report little more than a farce?
- Tom, Scotland
How can Keloggs Special K rank so well when it was listed in the May 2009 Independent Top 100 products to contain Palm Oil from unsustainable sources????
- Andrea Telford, Wakefield, West Yorks, UK
Consider yourself all idiots that know absolutely nothing about the economics of what is 'green' and wield your ignorance in the direction of something that truly deserves it. Or you could do a little research and find out exactly why this survey you've so easily dismissed is actually correct.
- David, Surrey
How can a product in plastic bottles, that travels thousands of miles in Diesel powered trucks and is produced in France be considered Environmentaly friendly? Kind of puts the Kibosh on this survey!
- Nick, London
Evian??? hard to think of anything less green. As Bob from Cheam says, it's brought from another country in a big filthy lorry. Oh, and in plastic bottles.
- Sarahn, London, UK
How can French water make it into the Top 10? Does it get here through the sewers and magic itself across La Manche?
What a load of eco-nonsense!
- Nobby Clark, Perth, the Scottish one
Volvic and Evian are obviously green because they come from France and have to be shipped nearly a thousand miles using a lorry which has very high emissions.
- Bob, Cheam
