Sustainable Shopping App Giki Launches New Low Carbon Footprint Badge for London Climate Action Week

LONDON - June 26, 2019 - PRLog -- Giki (https://gikibadges.com/), the Social Enterprise committed to making it easy to find sustainable, healthy and ethical products, today announced the new release of its Low Carbon Footprint badge, available on the Giki app. The Low Carbon Footprint badge is one of the smartphone app's 13 badges and sorts product categories into low, medium, high and very high carbon footprints. The latest update of the badge marks Giki's support of London Climate Action Week (1-8 July 2019), making it easy for consumers to find products which are fully aligned with a 1.5 degree lifestyle for food and drink, and are also often healthier options.

Giki is a mobile app that informs users about the UK supermarket products they buy and the companies they buy from, by awarding badges to products based on sustainability, health and fairness. Giki's aim is to drive sustainable consumption by connecting consumer values with their shopping decisions, allowing them to scan products' barcodes through the app and see which badges have been awarded by the social enterprise. Giki encourage full transparency and sustainable consumption by drawing on a number of different data sources such as product information, government guidelines and scientific research.

"At Giki we want to make it easier to live a more sustainable lifestyle" says Jo Hand, co-founder of Giki. "Carbon emissions are a crucial part of our environmental impact, and food and drink make up a quarter of our personal carbon footprint. For the first time, you can now easily check the carbon impact of a UK supermarket product using our app and our low carbon footprint badge."

London Climate Action Week is an initiative by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, following his declaration of a climate emergency. The first ever London Climate Action Week will take place between 1-8 July 2019, bringing together London's climate expertise and talent from across sectors to run events, and focus on scaling up practical solutions and identifying new opportunities to help cut carbon emissions to keep global temperature increases within 1.5 degrees and support the Paris Agreement.

Giki offers a practical solution for consumers to reduce their carbon footprint daily, in line with the goals of London Climate Action Week. "London Climate Action Week is helping to build the momentum around a 1.5 degree lifestyle," says Jo Hand. "This is a crucial step, if we are to live up to UK commitments of zero carbon by 2050. At Giki we provide ratings on UK supermarket products which enable us all to identify products with a lower environmental impact. The low carbon footprint badge indicates products aligned with living a 1.5 degree lifestyle."

The Giki mobile app offers a simple way to find alternatives to high carbon footprint meals, based on major academic and scientific carbon footprint studies from around the world and drawing on 280,000 UK supermarket products in the Giki database. "Just over one third of UK supermarket products have a low carbon footprint" says Jo Hand. "Consuming these products would enable you to live a 1.5 degree lifestyle in terms of diet. We compared two meals: Steak, chips and salad, followed by cheese and biscuits, as Meal 1, and vegetable risotto followed by fruit salad as Meal 2. Meal 1 has a carbon footprint five times larger than Meal 2, largely due to beef, and the agricultural land required to produce Meal 1 is 7 times greater than Meal 2."

For more details on Giki and the Low Carbon Footprint badge, visit Giki's website https://gikibadges.com/ For more information on London Climate Action Week, visit the Mayor of London's website (https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/environment/climate-...).

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About Giki

Giki is a Social Enterprise co-founded by Jo and James Hand in 2017 and stands for Get Informed Know your Impact.The Giki mobile app launched on iPhone in May 2018 and on Android in October 2018 and now counts over 280,000 rated products from all major UK supermarket retailers and brands, including  own label, with 13 badges, including Low Carbon Footprint, Animal Welfare, Healthier Option and Better Packaging. As of June 2019, the Giki app counts 5,000 monthly active users and 13,000 downloads. Giki's mission is to encourage sustainable consumption by inspiring people to make small, regular changes in their shopping which are good for them, better for the environment and fairer to others. For more information about Giki, visit https://gikibadges.com/