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- The Week in Low Carbon Commerce - Dec 4, 2023
The Week in Low Carbon Commerce
December 4, 2023
What’s Hot
🍲 The U.S. FDA, USDA, and EPA released a draft national strategy to drive progress toward the national goal to reduce food loss and waste by 50% by 2030, inviting public comment.
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♻️ The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) shared findings from new consumer research into products’ claims of recyclability, compostability, and biodegradability.
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🚚 Electric delivery startup BrightDrop, which emerged from GM’s Innovation Lab and has operated as a GM subsidiary for three years, has been merged into the company.
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Retailers
📦 Carrefour and HowGood partnered to showcase sustainability claim shelf tags at COP28, highlighting products’ climate footprint, water usage, and other attributes.
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📦 Amazon says that refurbished and pre-owned goods are a $1.3B business in Europe.
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Brands
🐄 Danone is partnering with the Global Methane Hub to support research to mitigate enteric methane fermentation via feed additives, plant and animal genetics, and methane vaccines.
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🌍 Mars launched an ad campaign called the “Healthy Planet Campaign” that reuses past ads with messages of “hope and progress” around climate, following the recent publication of its Net Zero Roadmap. The company prioritized carbon avoidance in the production of campaign.
See our analysis of the Mars Net Zero Roadmap here.
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🥃 Diageo signed a global agreement with ecoSPIRITS to distribute Gordon’s, Captain Morgan, and Smirnoff in reusable glass packaging in 18 markets over the next three years. Participating bars, hotels, and restaurants will receive the spirits in bottles designed to be used up to 150x. The company expects to the program to reduce both costs and carbon.
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🧀 KraftHeinz and NotCo launched KRAFT NotMac&Cheese, the company’s first plant-based KRAFT Mac & Cheese, in the United States, claiming the product’s taste and texture could help overcome consumers’ complaints about other plant-based alternatives.
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Deals and funding
🥛 Plant-based milk maker Ripple raised $49M in a Series F round.
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🌿 Milan-based vertical farming startup Planet Farms raised $40M, citing plans to invest in R&D to apply its technology in categories beyond food, like fragrances and cosmetics.
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📱Reboxed, a B2B and B2C electronics recommerce platform based in London, raised £1.6M in seed funding.
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From the podcast
In 2007, Tesco announced plans to carbon label 70,000 of their own-brand products.
Despite reducing per-product footprinting costs from £20-25k to £2-3k, in 2012 the plan was abandoned because the labels took months to calculate.
More than 15 years later, the work of estimating product-level climate footprints has been made vastly more accurate and efficient by technology.
In this episode with David Bryngelsson, co-founder and CEO of CarbonCloud, we discuss
Why broad-based, industry-agnostic approaches to footprinting aren't optimal for food retailers and brands
Whether retailers, brands, or regulators are likeliest to drive carbon labels into the mainstream
Why CarbonCloud favors quantitative labels over other approaches
How product-level data is already influencing retailers' decisions about assortment and distribution
Featured jobs
Check out all of the jobs (or post yours) on the Decarbonizing Commerce Career Board.
