Carbon Trading Summit — Part 3 — Food glorious food
Greensense recently attended the Carbon Trading Summit presented by the AIA. This is Part 3 of a series. You may like to start by reading Part 1 and Part 2.
Following Ray Wills and Andrew Canyon, we heard from Tony Mahar, Director of Sustainable Development with the Australian Food and Grocery Council.
Tony started with some background on the businesses represented by the Australian Food and Grocery Council. I was interested to hear that food manufacturing is the largest manufacturing sector in Australia, and is larger than automative parts and textiles.
Tony echoed some of the comments made by Andrew Canyon, calling for the CPRS to be delayed because industry needed more time to respond. He also made some interesting comments about the related Agriculture sector and how their eventual inclusion in the CPRS could create an additional burden for food manufacturers.
Initially, the CPRS will include about 1000 businesses that together account for around 75% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Including Agriculture within the CPRS, potentially slated for 2015, would require an additional 130,000 businesses to be included. In addition there are some technical challenges measuring on-farm emissions. One possibility raised by the White Paper is shifting the point of obligation up the supply chain to the food manufacturers. Tony also made an interesting aside about the potential for climate change to reduce the nutritional value of food.
Tony then spent some time on a case study of Mars Food Australia and the action they were taking. They have recently completed a life cycle assessment of Dolmio pasta sauce using the PAS2050 methodology.
Mars found that there are 259g CO2e emissions associated with every $1 unit of product. The majority comes from the glass jar and metal cap. Given the ceiling price of $40 per tonne in the proposed CPRS the 259g would have a carbon cost of around 1c.
However, this does not mean Mars would be directly liable for these emissions under the CPRS or would even necessarily incur additional costs from their up-stream supply chain for that cost of carbon. This is something we might discuss more in a later post.
I’ll conclude this series in my next post with some comments on the presentation made by Kim Horne, from Alcoa.
Tags: carbon trading summit
