The growing pressure on companies to decarbonise their production processes and their value chain forces them to be aware of and rigorously control the three scopes of their carbon footprint. Given that in most companies, Scope 3 represents values greater than 70% of the organisation's total, and of this, around 80% is associated with the extraction, production and processing of the materials purchased, it is essential to have quality information on the carbon footprint of the materials purchased.
Quality information on the carbon footprint of purchased materials is key to a corporate decarbonisation strategy..
The availability of emission factors for purchased raw materials and components is in the form of combinations of primary data (directly measured or collected data representative of the activities of a specific installation/process or set of installations/processes") with secondary data (data that are not directly collected, measured or estimated but are derived from a third-party life cycle inventory database).
Due to the still limited distribution of primary data in the business ecosystem (which must be obtained directly from manufacturers), it is common to use only secondary data as emission factors for purchased materials.
In terms of the quality of the resulting information, a product emission factor (Kg CO2e) obtained from primary data of the manufacturing processes will give specific and more accurate information on the global warming potential of the product than an emission factor from databases (a secondary data is an averaged value, therefore not specific).
An emission factor derived from primary data on manufacturing processes will give more accurate and specific information on the global warming potential of the product.
It is important to note the difference between the nature of primary data and the nature of secondary data: when a manufacturer has calculated the emission factor of its product from direct production data (primary data), it is in a position to identify the most contributing processes, detect decarbonisation opportunities and devise reduction measures. Once the measures are implemented and the product's carbon footprint is reduced, this reduction will be automatically passed on to its customers, who will see a reduction in the scope 3 of their organisational carbon footprint.
Product carbon footprint management tools
At Zirkel we encourage our clients to measure the carbon footprint of their products. We design specific tools for this purpose, such as product footprint calculators or specific measurement studies using Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). To make environmental communication transparent and credible, we prepare studies for obtaining environmental labels, such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPD/EP) and accompany in the verification of product carbon footprint reports (ISO 14067).
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