ABSTRACT
This book was always going to be a journey, a journey in uncharted territory, maybe even a little stop-start at times, but I felt that some slow progress was being made. I now knew certain things. I knew that attitudes were generally positive towards low-carbon-footprint products and that people were, inside, relatively green (in some domains at least), but I also knew that people didn’t really pick up on carbon footprint information in the time it takes to make a supermarket decision. The idea behind carbon labelling was (in principle) a good one, an empowering one. It allowed ordinary people to act in accordance with their underlying beliefs, but the actual mechanics of carbon labelling – how the information was represented, what kind of icons were used, what kind of numerical information was included, how the label looked – all needed a little bit more thought. Even those with the right underlying attitudes, the majority of the respondents, weren’t attending to the information in that 5-second or 10-second envelope that is critical to the purchasing decision in the supermarket. And perhaps people didn’t really care quite enough to find the carbon label icon in the necessary time frame. Their attention was not automatically drawn to it.
