My 88-year-old father, who lives in Greenwich Village, is an observant man. I visited today and he asked me to look at two bottles of apple juice from his refrigerator.
He had paid $3.69 for a 64-ounce plastic bottle of Mott’s Apple Juice, the brand we’d had as kids. That’s about 5.7 cents an ounce.
A friend had bought for him a 48-ounce bottle of organic Apple & Eve apple juice for $8, he recalled. That’s 16.6 cents an ounce, nearly three times as much.
Well, I said, organic food generally costs more. And while $8 is a lot to pay for apple juice, his friend had bought it at Citarella, a fancy-shmancy grocery story nearby.
Then he pointed out something I hadn’t noticed. In tiny black print on the neck of the Apple & Eve bottle, it said “conc from Turkey bottled in the U.S.” The company evidently bought concentrate from apples grown in Turkey, presumably because it’s cheap, and shipped it halfway around the world.
Here’s the puzzle: Which bottle of apple juice is better for the planet?
I have no idea. I don’t know where Mott’s got its apples. I don’t know how much energy was used to ship and bottle either brand of juice. I don’t know how the workers were treated in Turkey, or how well the organic standard is enforced there. I don’t know about the plastic packaging. Your ideas are welcome.
I bring this up for two reasons. The first is to say that while the USDA Organic designation tells us about a single attribute of a product, it doesn’t get us very far I we want to understand the product’s full environmental impact. The best tool we have to do that is a developing science called Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA. It’s an attempt to take into account the raw materials, manufacturing, shipping, use and disposal of a product–the fertiziler used to grow the corn in a box of corn flakes, the chemicals and energy it takes to make a solar panel. The second reason to raise this question is to tease readers of this blog: I’ve recently become aware of a large-scale effort by business people and academics who are committed to working hard to solve puzzles like this one. More to come on that next week.
Great observation!
What are your thoughts on how far should the LCA be carried out? Should there be a limit to the assessment?
I’m not an LCA expert but clearly we want to dig into the beginning of the supply chain as far as we can. Measuring usage should be doable with many products–i.e., CFL versus incandescents. I don’t know about disposal. This will be a big issue going forward, I think.
Marc,
That’s indeed a good puzzle, and LCA is one answer. The real answer to cut through this morass of tradeoffs and conflicting advice, of course, is to put a price on pollution through caps on carbon and nitrogen, and to get out of the way.
It’s the most scientifically sound and economically rational solution one could hope for, and it’s liberating for anyone who has ever tried to weigh the benefits of locally grown conventional apples against organic ones hailing from out-of-state in a grocery store aisle. (My answer, with or without cap-and-trade: get the organic one. It’s good for you, and good for the planet. Why would you want to increase pesticide use in your local community?)
That’s also a good case of regulation being truly liberating. It’s not a choice between “liberty and tyranny,” how Michelle Bachman would — and did — put it. Well, actually it is. The tyranny, though, is on the side of no cap. The liberty comes with smart regulation.
Looking forward to your follow-on blog post.
Best,
Gernot
Marc-
LCA makes a great construct for determining what processing aspects can have the greatest environmental impacts. LCA may also provide the foundation for determining the theoretical costs and benefits for pollution prevention or reduction to both producers and consumers. What LCA will not yet do is facilitate the finance necessary to install such improvements. Since prices for most environmental services remain deeply discounted (carbon, water, biodiversity etc.) from the prices imputed in LCA modeling, the financial industry is unable to carry them on term sheets and balance sheets as “public goods” so lending is tough for improvements without direct subsidies (like CDM credits). LCA, like the environmental accounting schemes of the 80’s nd 90’s, presupposes functioning markets for environmental services. Unless these services become operational and reputational risks, or competetive advantages, LCA will remain an obscure science with limited impact. Ask Bill McDonough.
Dave
Dave and Gernot, you both make excellent points. Even once we understand the full environmental impacts on a product, the challenge will be to price those into the marketplace. Carbon pricing is a good start, although I don’t think Waxman-Markey will go far enough to set a meaningful price on carbon, for a number of reasons.
While I don’t want to get ahead of myself, watch this space over the next few days for a major story about LCA that could bring the idea into the mainstream.
[...] « An apple juice puzzle [...]
Marc,
Just briefly in response to your July 12 comment: LCA is useful, and I agree that Wal-Mart’s new sustainability index is a major step in the right direction.
The point of cap-and-trade for carbon, though, is that we don’t need full LCAs for every one of some 10 billion products sold in the world to then be able to price the externalities correctly. With a strong overall cap on carbon, we’ll be able to internalize the carbon externalities without knowing any of these individual product-by-product impacts.
Best,
Gernot
Many people confuse “organic” with “environmental conservation”, but there really is no relationship between the two. The organic label was conceived of as a fallout from the rise of unhealthy, over-processed foods, of specific concern was the use of unhealthy pesticides and herbicides. The fact that these chemicals were also harming nature was merely a coincidence. This is something anyone concerned with “environmental conservation” should realize the next time they consider buying “organic” for the wrong reason.
[...] that you can determine its environmental impact. But, as Marc Gunther points out in his excellent post about everyday supermarket apple juice, the calculations involved are anything but simple [...]