Technorama

Tuesday, 1 December 2009

Clear Product Origin Labeling

Just bought from Tesco, Daily Care Toothpaste. What I didn't realise until I got home and read the small print was that it had come all the way from China!

My usual Colgate is made in the EU (Poland). I would rather buy UK materials+production, but there don't seem to be any left (we used to have a toothpaste and even Brillo pad down the road).

Therefore, I put out a call for legislation to have compulsory labeling of:

• Product origin in country name in large letting, equal size to product name/description.
• The origin must not be disguised ("Scottish" Salmon produced in Russia, packaged in Scotland etc)
• Km from the top destinations (as a product made in Beijing is 3,700 Km from Tibet).

Labels: Environment, Europe, UK

posted by 東京  # 20:03

Comments:

You're pretty liberal when it comes to developing software, yet you sound conservative when you talk about tangible goods.

While I admit that quality of workmanship differs in UK, Poland, Russia and China, I consider it a temporary difference.

Boycotting foreign-made goods (and labeling them as clearly foreign is going to have this result) stifles innovation - it's a real-world version of NIH syndrome.

Do you really want to stick to British-made ZX Spectrum instead of American-designed and Chineese-made PCs?

# posted by  RCL : 29 December 2009 at 20:33

 

Good point about NIH. I'm not sure if that really caused the ZX Spectrum to not do well in North America though. Definitely like in Japan, they won't even consider playing foreign developed video games.

If local produced computers follow the same open standards it's no problem. I used to be a great advocate of Acorn Archimedes computers and RISC OS. Back in 2000 I encouraged them to open up, sadly they didn't, and RISC OS has pretty much disappeared now. At least the ARM architecture survived!

# posted by  東京 : 30 December 2009 at 13:38

 

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