Environment

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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:

Adding food categories using the app
  • 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 even answer them if you don't have any products in your hands. For more instructions, see this page.
Adding food categories using Hunger Games
Adding food categories using the mass edit extension
  • 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.
  • You can use it in conjunction with the Power User Script to get Categorization opportunities suggestions

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.


See also Eco-Score - Agribalyse coverage

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

Random mode

Packaging

Infinite annotation

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) Max Havelaar
Faitrade Max Havelaar Rainforest Alliance MSC
AB Bio French pork EU agriculture - only EU origins ASC
Origine France Nature & Progrès Bio Cohérence Demeter
EG Öko-Verordnung AB Bio (en) Label Rouge (en)

If you find anymore interesting labels, feel free to add them.

Help add the organic label

List of Hunger Games links to help with organic coverage

Products with an ASC code without the ASC label

Products with an ASC code without the ASC label

Products with an MSC code without the MSC label

Products with an MSC code without the MSC label

Categorize environmental labels in the labels taxonomy

It's now possible to add categories to labels to help the apps and website display it in a nicer way. Categorizing environmental labels will greatly help with that. Categorize environmental labels on GitHub 

en:Label Rouge
ca:Etiqueta Vermella
de:Label Rouge
es:Label Rouge
fi:Label Rouge
fr:Label Rouge
nl:Label Rouge
wikidata:en:Q3214309
label_categories:en: en:Quality, en:Environment

Getting information and logos for environmental labels

    • provide 1-line bullet points of what it means (there can be several bullet points)
    • Find a icon idea for each bullet point (not the icon itself, but an idea for the icon) using The Noun Project
    • Add the Wikipedia/Wikidata page to the label taxonomy if it's not already available
    • Get the logo in SVG (or PNG otherwise): If we don't have a SVG logo, we'd need one, if possible like this: label-name-as-it-is-in-the-openfoodfacts-url.123x90.svg The height comes in second and should always be 90. You need to calculate the ratio to find out the width. if the logo is 246x180, you need to divide the height by 2 to get to 90, so you need to put height 90, and width 246/2=123.
  • Send your research to @teolemon or commit it directly to GitHub if you are familiar with it.

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)

  1. You can select and crop photos of the recycling instructions for existing products

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.


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

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…
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