An integrated environmental and fairtrade labelling scheme for product supply chains

Environmental initiatives such as carbon labelling have been suggested as a driver for achieving sustainable production systems of product supply chains. The paper therefore presents a systematic process of developing an environmental labelling framework as an extension of carbon labelling using the fairtrade certification as a platform to facilitate the process. Using the general theoretical constructs of lifecycle assessments, the framework presented provides insight into the formulation of multi-regional supply chains which has been specifically characterised in this paper for the UK–India–Rest of the World supply chain. The environmental labelling process presented in this paper is based on two key principles; Quantitative Principle in Eco-labelling and the Principle of Whole Lifecycle Perspective and it is used to inform two key stakeholder groups in the supply chain: consumers and supply chain partners.

For consumers, a consistent way of presenting the environmental label information is presented highlighting the supply chain impacts across the indicators of CO2-eq emissions, water consumption and land use in addition to regional contributions to these impacts from a global supply chain perspective. Additionally, communicating the environmental impacts to supply chain partners provides a decision support to take actions to reduce the overall impacts by identifying processes within the global supply chain that needed prioritisation.

Given that fairtrade partnership is based on participatory development and a strict guidelines and standardisation process, it is envisaged that synergies can be derived by integrating environmental labelling with the fairtrade scheme to enhance the environmental sustainability of product supply chains.