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Will Carbon Footprint Join 'Low Fat' And 'Less Calories'?

Would you be more inclined to buy a container of Tropicana orange juice if the packaging trumpeted the fact that its carbon imprint brand was 3.75 -- meaning that the equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon carton of orange juice that's produced? It may not have quite the same ring that "lower your cholesterol" has on a box of Cheerios or "less fat" has on a package of Ritz, but PepsiCo is wrestling with how to use the data it has collected on exactly how much impact manufacturing its OJ has on the environment.

The biggest contributor to a carton of OJ's carbon footprint isn't the power required to run the machinery or the fuel used to transport the finished product, as you might have guessed, but rather the growing of the oranges themselves. Oranges require a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, which requires natural gas to make, Andrew Martin reports.

There's a controversy brewing over exactly what the carbon footprint numbers mean, and how to use them. Some environmentalists say that any marketing claims would be "backed by fuzzy numbers and dubious assumptions," Martin writes. Nancy Hirshberg, vp for natural resources at Stonyfield Farm, feels that measuring a carbon footprint is a "fabulous tool" for pinpointing areas to reduce emissions but that the number is meaningless as a marketing tool.

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