If I asked you right now to tell me how much CO2 is in your products or services, how would you respond? What software or processes in your organisation would you go to, click a button and output a report from? Which person inside your organisation would you talk to?
It is at this stage not new information that we are in a race to decarbonise our societies. Around the world there is a tidal wave of legislative effort and progress being made on the reduction of carbon emissions. There are international, supranational, national and local requirements, guidance and the need for systematic reduction of carbon emissions in products and services.
A manager at a large organisation with a large suite of products will be asked to show CO2 reductions to their suite of products and services, but show reductions from what, when and where? It could be CSRD in your European operations, requiring you to report more on your organisation's sustainability, or it could be a requirement to show the amount of emissions in your product for the purposes of cross border trade such as in CBAM.
Maybe you are a much smaller supplier and you are being asked by your upstream sales partners to verifiably prove that your product is indeed low carbon, and you need a utensil to prove this. How about the reductions, how do you know when a new process you’ve implemented to your supply chain and product life cycle actually does have a positive CO2 impact on your products and services?
You would need a way of measuring data in such a way that you could set a baseline and then follow up on it in the future, identify hotspots and also compare products and services against one another. Enter the Product Carbon Footprint.
What is a Product Carbon Footprint?
A Product Carbon Footprint is the output of a process that can be referred to by a few names, product-level carbon accounting, product lifecycle accounting and product carbon footprinting. The PCF provided will give a measurement of the carbon emissions or product-embodied carbon that resides in the life cycle of that product.
Defining a Product Carbon Footprint
The official definition of a Product Carbon Footprint from the PACT Methodology, and the one that ZeroTwentyFifty takes to be our definition of the term, is as follows:
Total GHG emissions generated during the life cycle of a product measured in CO2e.
According to ISO 14067, the lifecycle of a product takes the following steps:
- Acquisition of raw material
- Design
- Production
- Transportation/delivery
- Use and the end-of-life treatment
A Product Carbon Footprint can be thought of in many ways as a way of adding additional information about the creation of an economic product, of a way of calculating the emissions impact and cost of a product outside of just the economic or financial costs.
What is CO2e or Carbon dioxide equivalent?
It’s also important to note here that the word carbon here will typically mean a value typically termed “CO2/Kge”, which stands for “Kilograms of CO2 equivalents” so a translation is done from the common greenhouse gases with a “warming potential” and that number is provided back as what it would be in CO2, this is because it’s easier to communicate this to users of the value, and it would be a pain to communicate the different gases because there are a lot of them and the numbers would be difficult to understand, not to mention that the list actually grows and changes between reporting cycles, as the science improves and as new information is discovered. This is not a strong area of mine, so if you have an interest in this, I’d recommend reading the most recent IPCC report.
You can basically think of a Product Carbon Footprint as the output of the process that takes place when you ask a mixologist for a long-island iced tea. The Product Carbon Footprint here being the cocktail, the mixing being the product-level carbon accounting. Depending on your interest, you may not necessarily be too interested in how the drink was created, but you definitely care about what you’re served.
What is Life Cycle Assessment and how does it relate to a Product Carbon Footprint?
Unfortunately, I can’t continue this introduction to PCFs without first back tracking to introduce a higher level/foundational concept. The difference between PCF and LCA actually befuddled me quite a bit when I started learning about decarbonisation and given that in previous writing on this blog, I have mentioned that the origin of ZeroTwentyFifty was the result of conversations with members of the Life Cycle Assessment community, so what’s the difference between LCA and PCF?
Defining Lifecycle Assessment
It’s useful to first define Lifecycle Assessment, so here is the official definition from ISO 14040/14044:
LCA addresses the environmental aspects and potential environmental impacts (e.g. use of resources and the environmental consequences of releases) throughout a product's life cycle from raw material acquisition through production, use, end-of-life treatment, recycling and final disposal (i.e. cradle-to-grave).
So the difference between Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) is that LCA covers the entire impact cycle of a product, while PCF only focuses on the carbon emissions of a product.
ISO 14040 and ISO14044 taken together define a consistent approach to Life Cycle Assessment, this approach results in the creation of a 4 stage process of:
- Goal and Scope
- Data Collection
- LCI Model development
- LCIA calculation & analysis.
This process is used to analyse the life cycle of a product, as seen below:
- Acquisition of raw material
- Design
- Production
- Transportation/Delivery
- Use and the End-of-Life Treatment
What impact categories are available for us to assess via Life Cycle Assessment?
There are a number of impact categories other than Climate Change/Carbon Emissions that we can assess. The European Environmental Footprint standard has 16 impact categories that a product can be assessed against, these are:
- Climate Change (CC)
- Ozone Depletion (ODP)
- Human toxicity, cancer effects (HTOX-C)
- Human toxicity, non-cancer effects (HTOX_nc)
- Particulate Matter (PM)
- Ionising Radiation (IR)
- Photochemical Ozone Formation (POF)
- Acidification (AC)
- Eutrophication, terrestrial (TEU)
- Eutrophication, freshwater (FEU)
- Eutrophication, marine (MEU)
- Ecotoxicity, freshwater (ECOTOX)
- Land Use (LU)
- Water Use (WU)
- Resource Use, fossils (FRD)
- Resource Use, minerals and metals (MRD)
As you can see, Climate Change (CC) is only one of them.
Are there limitations in ignoring the other impact categories of LCA and focusing only on climate change?
We will be introducing in greater detail the ISO 14067 and GHG Protocol Product Standard in following sections, so I’m only going to be covering what they say regarding the focus on a single environmental category at the ignorance of the others, because the PCF vs LCA approach does indeed have limitations.
Common limitations acknowledged by both ISO 14067 and the GHG Protocol Product Standard:
- Focus on a single environmental issue at the expense of the other impacts
- Methodological limitations.
- Reduced usefulness in communication of overall impacts.
I find myself regularly pointing something out and then not delving deeper into it, leaving my dear readers hopefully with something to think about, so allow me again to continue this bad habit. In many ways a Product Carbon Footprint does the similar thing to the other impact categories of LCA as financial accounting does to carbon accounting, it omits data and information that it deems to be non-relevant. Which it would be easy to argue is an issue that should not be repeated, however, given the state of the climate emergency, we could be easily forgiven for such ignorance. ZeroTwentyFifty has chosen at this time to focus its entire attention on that of carbon accounting and the calculation of carbon emissions. Long range it would be great to change this view.
A (maybe) simple analogy for understanding how LCA and PCF together
Anyone who’s read prior writing of mine knows that I’m a fan of terrible analogies, largely food related, think of LCA as Pasta, and Impact Categories as shapes of pasta, except in our fictitious universe, there’s not the ~350 varieties of pasta that we have available to us, there’s only 16 of them (the amount listed in the EU Environmental Footprint standard, if you remember). Now imagine that we ignore 15 of them, and only enjoy one type of pasta. That’s effectively what we’re doing with Product Carbon Footprinting, we’re only eating one type of pasta. Make whatever parallel you like with this, but I know that some foodies would tell you it’s a crime to make mac and cheese with spaghetti (myself included).
How is a PCF created?
The how of a Product Carbon Footprint is different from the what, in the what, we ideally have a comparable figure with which we can make informed decisions and reason about the embodied carbon of our product. However, how we come to this usable artefact is a more complicated process.
Product-level Carbon Accounting
PCFs are created through the application of a product-level carbon accounting standard or methodology that provides guidance to those undertaking the assessment. Most product carbon footprint standards are based off the original ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 LCA standards, so PCFs are a specialised version of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), which makes sense given the LCA will calculate for all impact categories whilst the PCF is just for GHG emissions presented as CO2 equivalents.
PCFs are created using a carbon accounting standard that provides guidance on how to make a PCF, the three most popular product-level carbon accounting methodologies are based on the ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 LCA standards.
You can think of this hierarchy as the original ISO 14040 defining how to perform an assessment on a range of 16 environmental indicators, our chosen product-level carbon accounting methodology then specialises this process for a single indicator. In our case this indicator will be the CO2 emissions Impact Category displayed as carbon dioxide equivalents of CO2(which is actually all Greenhouse Gases).
However, this can be altered depending on the standard, as mentioned above, most product-level carbon accounting methodologies are based off the ISO 14040/14044 standards, where this 4 stage process is taken from, but some methodologies devise additional levels of prescriptiveness and guidance to produce a more streamlined process for the creation of the Product Carbon Footprint. depending on the type of product or industry.
What’s the difference between a PCF standard, methodology and protocol?
This is also a good time to mention that when it comes to Product Carbon Footprints and the process of creating them, there are a number of terms thrown around to refer to the standards we use. You may see:
- Product Carbon Footprint Methodology
- PCF Protocol
- Carbon Accounting Standard
Ultimately whilst they may have different definitions in a strict sense, there isn’t much of a difference between their meaning in a PCF context, and you will often find the terms used interchangeably throughout the literature. Ultimately, what it really boils down to is that they all define a way of calculating the Product Carbon Footprint in a structured and repeatable way.
What are the most common methodologies used for PCF?
So we covered how a PCF is created in our previous section, and mentioned that most PCF standards are based on ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, as well as bringing up that there are many different standards, but how many are there, and what are the most common?
How many Product Carbon Footprint methodologies are there?
While it’s not comprehensive, we can illustrate the most commonly used standards and methodologies for completing a PCF with data from the Carbon Catalogue article that covers 866 PCFs and counts 24 Product Carbon Footprint standards and 1 additional category for “Not Specified” across the dataset. This means that across 866 PCFS, 70% were formatted in 3 formats, 20% were not identified by a standard, and the remaining 10% of were spread across 21 standards.
What are the most popular Product Carbon Footprint protocols?
Given our infographic shows that 70% of all reported PCFs in the CC article were created from 3 standards, what are they? The 3 most popular standards for creating product carbon footprints were:
This is also reflected in an analysis of Chinese made fiberboard.
An important thing to note here is that whilst we mentioned that most of the PCF methodologies are based off the original ISO 14040/14044 standards, within the 3 major standards there is also significant cross over and cross pollination, the analysis of fiberboard linked above had the following to say: “PAS 2050 is the first CF accounting protocol at a product level. The GHG Protocol was established based on ISO standards and the first version of PAS 2050. The three core protocols are based on ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 on life cycle assessment (LCA).”
What are the differences between the 3 major PCF Standards?
Linking back to our previous section, I mentioned that the various PCF standards are generally defined with differences in prescriptiveness, and unfortunately, covering those differences is definitely outside of the scope of this article, mainly because it will actually take an entire article to discuss them. So why don’t you subscribe to my mailing list? I promise we will send it directly to your inbox when we release it.
If you are really itching to get a bit of an insight however, here is an external resource covering the differences between PAS 2050 and the GHG Protocol Product Standard from the GHG Protocol themselves.
Conclusion
Product Carbon Footprints are becoming increasingly important for organisations and ecosystems to use as a source of more granular and realistic data. With increased participation from industry and a higher demand for their calculation and exchange, we can start to put further areas of our societies supply chains under a microscope, removing the greenhouse gas emissions generated by hot spot processes whilst slowing the negative impacts of anthropogenic climate change.
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