Conceptualizing & implementing a climate labelling system

One of the big hurdles preventing climate action is a lack of awareness of how much impact each individual action really has on the overall climate picture. A particularly promising solution here is that of putting “climate labels” on each packaged item (food, clothing, furniture etc). 

They would work essentially like the “nutrition facts label” found on all packaged food items, except that instead of providing fundamental info about the nutrition content of the product, it would succinctly tell us about the climate impacts of that product.

Here's how I think one might be able to convert this broad concept into a reality.

1. Somebody comes up with an effective labelling system, which describes key aspects of the climate impact of the item (for example, a stage-wise breakdown of the net CO2e emissions, the amount of different kinds of waste generated, etc). The labels would also put things into context by describing the percentage of an indvididual’s total recommended carbon emissions that this product would consume (much like the % daily value on nutrition labels).
2. The labelling system is tested for rigor: try to make these labels for various popular products; perhaps even conduct some scientific studies to understand how effective the labelling is on changing user behaviour (and how that can be changed). 
3. Climate activists persuade appropriate federal agencies to start requiring such labels on products. It might be helpful to research how exactly the fed does it for this part.
4. Content creators on social media start explaining to people the importance of the labels, call out brands that are secretly very eco unfriendly and highlight better alternatives. Much like FoodPharmer.

This would be particularly useful because now we no longer need to trust advertising from big corporations – we can just look at the labels and decide for ourselves whether they are climate friendly enough for our needs.

There’s considerable amount of work on this already in various scientific journals, online videos and online articles; so if you do start, you should probably research very deeply first!