Cradle-To-Consumer Environmental Impacts Explored

The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society has developed a model to assess the cradle-to-consumer environmental impacts from the manufacturing, transport and trade of 1,100 categories of consumer products and services. The organization says that particularly promising opportunities exist to provide environmental information for products and the point of sale. At a cost of carbon of $10/tCO2, the group estimates that incorporating the cost of carbon would only add about 0.5 percent to price of goods and services, and 0.7 percent to the price of food. By creating appropriate incentives for sustainable consumption as well as production, a more efficient and sustainable resource pricing system can begin to emerge that explicitly recognizes the connections between consumer behavior and global warming, according to this lecture on carbon footprint research.