Fast Carbon Footprinting for Large Product Portfolios

Abstract

Summary Publicly Available Specification 2050‐2011 (PAS 2050), the Green House Gas Product Protocol (GHGPP) standard and forthcoming guideline 14067 from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) have helped to propel carbon footprinting from a subdiscipline of life cycle assessment (LCA) to the mainstream. However, application of carbon footprinting to large portfolios of many distinct products and services is immensely resource intensive. Even if achieved, it often fails to inform company‐wide carbon reduction strategies because footprint data are disjointed or don't cover the whole portfolio. We introduce a novel approach to generate standard‐compliant product carbon footprints (CFs) for companies with large portfolios at a fraction of previously required time and expertise. The approach was developed and validated on an LCA dataset covering 1,137 individual products from a global packaged consumer goods company. Three novel techniques work in concert in a single approach that enables practitioners to calculate thousands of footprints virtually simultaneously: (i) a uniform data structure enables footprinting all products and services by looping the same algorithm; (ii) concurrent uncertainty analysis guides practitioners to gradually improve the accuracy of only those data that materially impact the results; and (iii) a predictive model generates estimated emission factors (EFs) for materials, thereby eliminating the manual mapping of a product or service's inventory to EF databases. These autogenerated EFs enable non‐LCA experts to calculate approximate CFs and alleviate resource constraints for companies embarking on large‐scale product carbon footprinting. We discuss implementation roadmaps for companies, including further road‐testing required to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach for other product portfolios, limitations, and future improvements of the fast footprinting methodology.

The science of sustainable supply chains

“…The footprinting concept is now being applied to specific environmental resources, such as carbon and water (8). A number of analysts have built on emerging standards to develop tools for rapidly assessing thousands of products in a company's portfolio (47).…”

Smart households: Dispatch strategies and economic analysis of distributed energy storage for residential peak shaving

“…The benefits in terms of GHG emissions abatement [52][53][54][55][56][57] or air pollution reduction are not yet quantified. Emission impact analyses would be worthwhile to investigate in the future, in order to compare the emission impact incurred by different storage dispatch strategies and varying storage technologies.…”

Developing a parametric carbon footprinting tool for the semiconductor industry

“…At present, the two main limitations in performing carbon footprinting are the required time and expertise and the lack of uniformity and integrated platform (Meinrenken et al 2012). Although PAS 2050(BSI 2011 and the latest ISO/TS 14067 (ISO 2013) have helped develop carbon footprint of product (CFP) as a sub-discipline of LCA, performing CFP of IC is often unattainable because of the relatively short development cycle and rapid change in design and manufacturing technologies.…”

“…In recent years, several studies on fast carbon footprinting have been published (Song and Lee 2010;Meinrenken et al 2012;Kuo 2013). Findings from these studies resulted in the construction of a collaborative system to help enterprises collect and calculate CFP in a readily and timely approach by integrating the enterprises' internal data from the enterprise resource planning system or similar data warehouses, such as the bill of materials (BOMs).…”