News
New TSC tools for animal-friendly products
The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) has developed six scientific, globally harmonised tools aimed at improving the welfare of six animals for human consumption: beef and dairy cattle, pigs, poultry for meat and for laying and farmed fish. These tools map the opportunities and obstacles in animal and aquaculture production chains, enabling animal and aquaculture producers to globally compare and improve animal welfare in their production chains.
The animal welfare scores are based on seven components: housing, handling and culling of animals, animal health and painful procedures and animal and health management. All actors in the production chain, including the farm, transport company and abattoir, can relatively easily measure and gather information on these ‘hotspots’ of animal welfare.
Comparing the sustainability of products
TSC has added the six new animal-welfare tools to its TSC Product Sustainability Toolkits, which measure the sustainability of consumer products throughout their lifecycle. So far 141 consumer products – including 58 agricultural and food products – have been calculated using this system. These tools enable businesses to consistently measure and compare the sustainability of all their products. Businesses can collaborate closely with their partners in the supply chain and use their scores for the various sustainability indicators as a foundation for developing plans for improvement and for taking sustainability (as well as price and quality) into account when procuring products. At present more than 1,700 suppliers utilise these tools to report to retailers regarding the sustainability of these products. This translates to more than €120 billion in consumer sales, nearly four times the total Dutch supermarket turnover. Read more about TSC's sustainability tools on the TSC website.
Wageningen University & Research is coordinating the European activities of TSC, of which Ahold, Unilever, Mars, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Solidaridad and more than 100 other companies and organisations are members.