Fast Product Footprinting and Carbon Management for Large Companies

PAS2050 and the forthcoming WRI and ISO14067 standards have helped to propel carbon footprinting from an LCA sub-discipline to the mainstream. However, applying these standards to portfolios of many products/services is immensely time consuming. Even if achieved, such footprinting often fails to inform company-wide carbon reduction strategies because footprint data is disjointed and does not cover the whole portfolio. Here, we describe a novel, must faster approach to generate standard-compliant product footprints. Three techniques enable footprinting thousands of products virtuously simultaneously: (1) concurrent uncertainty analysis guides practitioners towards those data that materially impact the results; (2) gradually evolving lookup tables for all inventory data maximize the use of inputs from other products or users; and (3) a statistical model estimates emission factors, thereby eliminating the time consuming manual mapping of a product/service's inventory to the vast selection of EF databases. With a case study covering ~1500 products across 3 continents from a leading packaged consumer goods company, we demonstrate how the approach enables footprinting individual products or entire portfolios, at a fraction of previously required expertise and employee hours. We discuss implementation roadmaps for companies as well as possible future improvements of the approach.