Are good intentions enough?
2nd July 2008
Are good intentions enough? By Paul Thomas
Telling customers about your environmental targets is all well and good but, as Paul Thomas argues, they are meaningless if you do not know how they are to be achieved.
Something that has concerned me over the past 18 months is the way in which companies make bold statements of intent without detailing how they are going to meet these objectives. Tesco committed itself last year to labelling every one of its 70,000 products with details of its carbon footprint, and promised to slash carbon emissions from its stores by 75 per cent in the next few years. But within days of the announcement, it dawned on Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy that getting hold of the information that would underpin the carbon-labelling revolution would not be as easy as popping down to one of his supermarkets for a pint of milk. One year on, Tesco is still in the early stages of trialling a carbon-labelling system on a small selection of its own-branded products.
