Environment

Open Food Facts is embarked on an effort to access the environmental impact of products. In summary, we need to

1. Categorize products in order to be able to use the lifecycle analysis averages that we already have.
2. Extract every little bit of information that we can from packagings, Including environmental labels and ingredients, both useful to have a better assessment of impact.
3. Improve our taxonomy system to be able to decipher it, and add explanations.
4. Gather lifecycle analysis data for countries outside of France or find ways to reverse-engineer lifecycle analysis files to tweak the parameters at very large scale

Adding food categories to assess the carbon footprint

In order to be able to apply the lifecycle analysis values, we need to know precisely the category of a product. You can help using various tools on Open Food Facts:

• The official app for Android and iPhone shows category prediction when you are logged in. You can answer them easily by tapping yes no or maybe. You can't even answer them if you don't have any products in your hands. For more instructions, see this page.
• You can use Hunger Games to validate category predictions in mass.
• You can use the Chrome extension to mass add categories. As this tool is powerful, its usage is restricted. Please contact @teolemon to get access.

Example:

• eggs - duck terrines

Having a full list of OFF categories linked to an Agribalyse category would be helpful

Important note:Even if the product has a category, having a more granular category may be useful, as we don't have lifecycle analysis for overly broad categories.

Environmental labels

We need to collect environmental labels.

• We have a logo annotation tool to help you collect labels at large scale.
• You can also validate labels using Hunger Games.

Validation using Hunger Games logos

Please read the guidelines before starting: Guidelines

Example for the organic label

Validation using Hunger Games labels

This is only a sub-selection of all the environnemental labels that might be relevant.

Header text	Header text	Header text	Header text
Organic	UTZ Certified	EU organic	Label Rouge
Haute Valeur Environnementale	Bleu Blanc Coeur	RSPO (palm oil)	Label Rouge
Faitrade	Max Havelaar	Rainforest Alliance	MSC
AB Bio	French pork	EU agriculture - only EU origins	ASC

Assessing product location

Processing locations & packaging codes

There are many traceability codes available on the food packaging. Those usually indicate the plant location which is helpful to compute distance the product has traveled. For instance, we do a map of all worldwide and European plants called Made Near Me. Some countries are still missing or not deployed.

TODO: Your help would be welcome (involves data harvesting and cleaning from official websites)

• EMB codes and EU Codes
• Madenear.me uses OFF data to indicate where the product was packaged

Origins of ingredients

Often times, the origin of ingredients is not in the ingredient list itself. It can be written on the packaging.

TODO: Create additional REGEX for Robotoff

Stores and brands

Those can be useful to get a coarse idea of location.

TODO: Improve the stores taxonomy worldwide and in France

LCA files produced by other institutions

We are lucky to get lifecycle analysis values for France but we need a similar values for other countries in the world. If you'd like to help with that, even for countries other than your own, please get in touch on Slack.

TODO: Get LCA values for various countries

Packaging

TODO:

1. We need to flesh out the packaging taxonomy that is currently on GitHub (TODO: Insert URL)

Fishing

See Fishing

TODO:

1. Adding translations for the common name of the fishes in your language would be useful.
2. Creating small descriptions of the fishing methods, probably based on Wikipedia, with a freely reusable image, that is coherent with the other fishing methods images

Carbon footprint printed on packaging

A very limited amount of companies compute and print the carbon footprint on the packaging. Gathering those is very useful whenever you see it.

• http://www.indice-environnemental.fr/les_produits/produit_w?id=242
• http://www.produits-casino.fr/developpement-durable/dd_indice-carbone-indice-calcul.html

Old brainstorm

Most of those elements are modeled into the LCA averages, so getting data on them is nice but not crucial to computing the CO2 impact on the short term.

• Different kind of products
• "Growing"/"Breeding" Footprint
  • Pesticides and other chemicals (fertilizer, herbicides , pesticides)
  • Water consumption
  • Nonrenewable resources
  • Land use (deforestation, biodiversity)
  • Waste management
    • Algae producer
• Transformation footprint
  • Harvest/Slaughter
  • Products with several sub-ingredients
    • Unknown sourcing of ingredients
    • Some ingredients sourced (and sometimes from remote places)
• Packaging footprint
  • FSC
  • Recyclability

Warehouse Locations

• Auchan - http://www.livrer-auchan.net/entrepots/carte-entrepots.php
• Carrefour - http://edi.carrefour.eu/gln_store.cfm?lang=fr

Point of sale location

• Point of sale field
• App where you could save your favorite store ?

Consumption location

• Would mean inputting your personal address and mean of transportation

Company CSR

• Fight against climate change (is the company carbon neutral ? how much is emitted ?…)
• ISO, environmental management systems, subcontractors…