The meaning of local

July 3, 2008 – 10:42 am

Local implies a geographic or spatial entity. In the past week I have been exposed to some very dubious local claims, so thought I would do a quick check on how local applies in the context of sustainability. Not straightforward or clear!

In the context of labour, the accepted definition seems to be the widest area within which employees with fixed addresses would accept employment. For some commuters I know this would stretch local to 3/4 of the country so perhaps this should be refined -e.g. closest 80% to eliminate the exceptionally committed travellers.

For travel, the only local definition I found encompassed trips to work, school, shopping, entertainment and visiting friends & family. In my case family trips could involve Scotland, Ireland and France which I don’t consider to be local, so perhaps this definition is from an era when people didn’t fly so far from the nest.

In politics and local government the terms local, regional, national and global are often used. There are 410 local councils and over 11,000 town parish and community councils according to the LGA. These distinctions suggest that local relates to a district and brings to mind local papers which tend to follow district council boundaries.

Food, the source of my dubious claims, has some rather advanced thinking on local. Sustain (The Alliance For Better Food and Farming) offers the following definitions for local food:

• produced within 30 miles of the point of sale (PoS)
• produced within 50 miles of PoS
• in towns and small cities produced within 50 miles of PoS
• for large cities produced within 70 miles of POS
• produced in the county.

So in practice local is going to differ depending on its context.  For procurement, if you stuck to the food definition you are likely to be left wanting for many products, however the above concepts do indicate the ball park of “true” local.

In practice, with other issues to balance, local must stretch to encompass at least two and ideally more suppliers to provide a reasonable level of competition and hopefully value for you as a customer.

Once you leave these shores to source your product surely local has left the building, and assessing the merits of different methods of transport, energy miles and the like is surely above the call of duty.  I have heard Bill Dunster claim that a container on a tanker from China uses less energy in transit than a lorry loaded container from Belgium.

Finally, is local the be all and end all?  Absolutely not, for example there is little merit in having a workforce commuting and raw materials transported further than necessary from their point of origin, and even waste materials being shifted back.  The most sustainable option is local if it is available, but its worthwhile evaluating people’s claims.  For the record my butcher gets the all clear (25 mile sausages), but the fish monger was always struggling.