What if we could pick up a bag of chips at the grocery store, and know, just by looking at the label, the climate impact as well as the calorie count? We aren’t there yet—at least not for most products in the United States—but a new web-based tool released by Swedish climate intelligence company CarbonCloud is bringing us closer to being able to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of a grocery list as easily as we would the nutrition values. It’s not quite ready to launch the carbon-counting revolution, but it is a start.
To test it out, I volunteered to run my editor’s weekly shopping list through the database and, by selecting the products and brands with the lowest emissions, ended up saving her the equivalent of 83.8 kg of CO2, about the same as driving a gasoline-powered car for 208 miles. And she still gets to eat Ben & Jerry’s for dessert, as long as she chooses the non-dairy Half Baked ice cream (2 kg CO2 per kg of ice cream) over regular Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (4 kg CO2/kg). (A pint of ice cream is about 0.25 kg)
Read more at Time.