Not many revolutions start with cheese and onion crisps, but this week they led the charge into carbon footprint labelling as Walkers tried out the Next Big Thing in the battle to drive the green agenda.

Retailers are clamouring to demonstrate their green credentials and answer demands for more information about the energy involved in producing the weekly shop.

Research by the Carbon Trust has found that two thirds of consumers say that they want to know the carbon footprint of the products they buy.

However, carbon labelling could be in danger of descending into the same farcical situation as nutritional labelling, with competing schemes run by rival retailers making it difficult for consumers to know which one to trust.

Ian Cheshire, chief executive of B&Q, told a forum on ethical business at the World Retail Congress in Barcelona: “This is an issue on which retailers need to agree an industry standard but at the moment companies are working on a variety of separate schemes.”

Tesco, the UK’s largest retailer, announced plans with great fanfare in January to develop a “commonly understood measure” of the amount of carbon emissions related to every product sold.

The supermarket said that it wanted to develop a Sustainable Consumption Institute to lead the project and commissioned the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at Oxford University to help to devise a measurement scheme.

Tesco insisted that it wanted to “collaborate with others around the world” on the project and convened a meeting with rival retailers J Sainsbury and Marks & Spencer, as well as its suppliers Unilever and PepsiCo to help to discuss how things might progress.

A further meeting of about 20 stakeholders including rival retailers and suppliers is set for early next month at the ECI.

Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s chief executive, said this week that he expected to have some products labelled by January. “We are getting a favourable reaction from other retailers and from around the world. It is probably the most remarkable communication we have ever made,” he said.

However, Sainsbury’s, M&S, Boots and a number of other companies have already been working with the Carbon Trust, a government-backed body dedicated to helping businesses to cut their carbon emissions, on a labelling scheme.

Boots, Walkers and Innocent drinks have committed themselves to testing the Carbon Trust-backed scheme and its logo will become increasingly apparent in stores over the next few months.

Marks & Spencer also has just completed a project with the Carbon Trust to map the emissions generated by its food products, although the retailer believes that it is some years away from being able confidently to label goods.

The Carbon Trust’s scheme attempts to calculate and represent the amount of carbon emissions generated in the production of an item and examines the supply chain behind a product.

It includes a commitment to reduce the carbon footprint of the product over time. If the producer cannot demonstrate it has reduced carbon emissions over a two-year period, it will no longer be allowed to use the label.

Euan Murray, strategy manager for the Carbon Trust, said that the organisation was working with other groups of companies and aimed to announce further trials in the next few months.

He said that, although Tesco was carrying out its own research, “they see the world very much as we do and we are trying to create a single way of measuring carbon footprints of products which we think is critical to the success of the venture”.

Sir Terry said that Tesco was “keen to work with everybody” and insisted that retailers were not headed for a re-enactment of the traffic light nutrional labelling debacle.

However, he pointed out that the scheme he envisaged was slightly different from the Carbon Trust’s proposed concept because it aimed to take into account the carbon used during consumption.

“We are not trying to gain competitive advantage on the thing,” Sir Terry said. “You have got to start the process. There is a danger if you went for a single standard that it would never get off the ground.

“The danger of trying to be too prescriptive is that you lock flaws in. It is better to be a little more flexible until things are on track and people have more experience of them.”

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