We also concluded that it was a meaningless system, when used to show levels of animal welfare.
I stand by what i said in the other traffic lights topic :
I think that often, 'traffic lights'-style labelling is too dumbed-down to convey enough information to be helpful in many if not most cases.
I think this even applies to food miles, when it comes to a traffic-light system.
On the surface we might say "if a product comes from the country where consumers buy it, give it a green light. If it comes from the same continent, give it an amber light and give everything else a red light"
But that's clearly too simplistic.
If a man from Scotland buys pesticides from Ghana, insecticide from Spain, fungicide from Iraq and herbicide from Japan, has them all sent to him in Scotland and uses them to grow 'UK produced' vegetables...... then what level of traffic lighting ought he to get ?
If an English man who keeps a warehouse full of cows buys all of his feed-grain from the amazonian forest area and from America, then uses them to raise 'British cows' , then what traffic lighting ought to be used to denote any flesh 'produced' by him ?
If we were to say red in both of these situations, which would be logical, then very few things on supermarket shelves would ever be marked anything other than red for food miles, and it would become the sort of thing which people ignore accordingly.
And, in that scheme, what of the people who would grow things in Wick then have then trucked by road down to Dover, who would be getting amber lights even though their stuff travels further than stuff which has been sent across the channel tunnel from france ?
So, maybe we should just look at the actual distance...... rather continents.
But, then that makes no distinction between something which has been carried as a bulk-lot by road and ferry over a few hundred miles, and something which has been put on an aeroplane to transport it over a few hundred miles.... even though one method of transport obviously causes rather more pollution etc, causes more carbon emission, costs more, etc, than the other.
So, what would you suggest ?
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