A recent article in the Guardian on UK Banks and their attempts to reduce their Carbon Footprints has got me thinking.

One of the ways to reduce our personal CO2 emissions that is attracting more and more attention, is to avoid buying food that has been transported inefficiently from far away, or that has been over-packaged. There is now pressure for supermarkets to provide details on the carbon footprint of a particular producet to help us decide whether or not to purchase it on environmental grounds.

But shouldn’t such information be part of our criteria for every purchase choice we make?

Wouldn’t we prefer to purchase a low-emissions PC from a PC manufacturer that itself has a low carbon footprint, or is at least making active efforts to reduce it? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the mobile phone company we have chosen generates lower emissions than its competitors? For that matter, how much CO2 does the current government, or each of the political parties generate, and what are they doing to reduce emissions?

As we all know, the Internet is used more and more as a research tool for a huge percentage of purchase decisions, and is often where we make our purchases too. I therefore did a quick ’surfing survey’, and visited a range of sites to see how up front they are about their carbon footprint. I visited the sites for: Lloyds TSB, HSBC, NatWest, Barclays, The Labour Party, The Conservative Party, The Liberal Democrats, Sainsburys, Tesco, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, Dixons, Ikea, Orange, Vodafone and O2.

Out of all of these sites, only Tesco, Sainsburys and O2 (on their .com site) mention the Environment on their home pages. HSBC is actively promoting their ‘Greener way to bank’ at the moment - it is not possible to know how permanent this link is.

If I was looking to make a purchase decision based on green credentials, I found I would have to look quite hard to find the necessary information, often hidden in the ‘Company’ or ‘Corporate Responsibility’ sections, rather a pity when you consider how hard Marks & Spencer is for instance working to reduce their Carbon footprint. No-one mentions carbon emissions or carbon footprints on their home page, although in the case of Tesco, maybe this is a good idea as they estimate that their UK direct emissions represent 0.3% of total UK emissions!!

I think it’s time to get the ball rolling on an on-line approach for all retailers and suppliers, in fact why not for all web sites? To help us to make an educated purchase decision based on the carbon footprint of a potential supplier, all web sites should have a ‘carbon footprint’ link from their home page to a page that shows their carbon footprint for the last year and details the efforts they are making or have made to reduce their CO2 emissions. I know that the Carbon Trust has set up an accreditation scheme for businesses - a special badge or banner should be provided to be placed on the home pages of accredited sites, especially those that have achieved zero emissions.

In fact, why not take this one step further? The inclusion of this ‘carbon footprint’ page should be included in the W3C recommendations, and, as they wield such power, why can’t Google suggest prioritising sites with a carbon footprint page over those without in their search results?

OK, I’m sure that today there aren’t that many people who worry about a supplier’s energy efficiency before making a purchase. But they should. And if they did, if everyone did, then these same suppliers would make a greater effort to reduce their CO2 emissions. It just could work…