Diseño

This blog has been produced exclusively for GreenBiz.  
We identified the True Cost of three everyday products: breakfast cereal, fruit juice and cheese by examing the stages of production from farmand orchard to the supermarket shelf.
The embedded carbon, water, waste and pollution were calculated for generic products in each category... no brand has been harmed in the generation of thesemetrics!
Now for the hard part - Trucost then calculated the "natural capital" cost of each of these. For carbon we used the social cost. For water, a local issue, we correlated the volume of waterrequired to produce the raw materials with local scarcity by gathering data on the location of production and pricing water accordingly.
The analysis indicates that, on average, the true cost of a blockof cheese should be 18% higher than the retail price, breakfast cereal should be 16% more expensive and fruit juice 6% more. Water is the most significant natural capital dependency for all of theproducts. Unsurprisingly for breakfast cereal wheat is the biggest draw on water in the supply chain. For fruit juice it is orange production and dairy cows make cheese production a thirsty business.Cheese is the most carbon intensive product and fruit juice the most wasteful.
This analysis illustrates the scale and type of natural capital cost for each of these products, on average. We should,however, raise a note of caution - clearly there will be significant variation when it comes to analyzing specific products and brands. To illustrate how some of these differences could arise we analyzedthe variation in water use and scarcity across the top 10 production locations of each product to demonstrate the scale of risk and opportunity. The natural capital cost of using water is drivenmainly by water availability at the production site, as well as by the type of water consumed and a range of other factors. For example, areas with high rainfall and less competition for resources will...