Carbon-Labelled Menus

Just as calorie counts on menus empower diners to make more informed choices about their health, The National University of Singapore (NUS) is trialing carbon-labelled meals on campus to give students the data they need to understand the environmental impact of their meals. Students browsing menus see the emissions of each meal in kg CO2e, and ingredient-level emissions are accounted for—from farming and production to sourcing—as are cooking methods, kitchen energy use, packaging, and waste treatment assumptions.

This menu labeling system is the result of NUS' Sustainable and Green Finance Institute working with carbon management platform Zevero on a research partnership, and the initiative will ultimately support NUS’s broader goal of creating a low-carbon campus. "This is exactly the kind of systemic intervention that drives long-term decarbonization," said Zevero co-founder and CEO Shigeo Taniuchi.