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Carbon Label
Looking at growing public sentiment, consumers are looking for information that tells them the carbon footprints of the products they buy, a so-called carbon label. The realisation that carbon reductions from changes to household energy consumption are dwarfed by industrial outputs means that concerned consumers will be driving providers of goods and services to take positive actions. Retailers and brand owners have to consider how to determine carbon footprints at the product level. This initiative has a direct relationship to the concepts of internal and external emissions as described above.
In order to determine a product level carbon footprint all emissions from raw material sourcing through to consumer purchase need to be considered. That means a full accounting of internal and external emissions related to the sourcing, manufacture, distribution and sale of each product.
The challenge arises when a large number of products or changes to the underlying supply, manufacturing and distribution processes are likely. The process of manually determining product level carbon footprints in this situation is simply a huge job that will need to be repeated on a periodic basis. By structuring processes that define how products flow through the trading partner community, and hence the activities they are involved in, it is possible to determine what carbon emissions are attributable to each product as it flows through the network.
Instead of potentially calculating thousands of product level carbon footprints, the business focuses on determining the emissions from activities only. Then the rules are calculated that define how emissions related to a group of products, and are allocated back to individual products. Once that is done the system can monitor the flow of products through the network, trigger the recording of carbon emissions based on transactional messages and automatically calculate the real carbon footprint for each product.
As underlying improvements to carbon management are made, and activities modified, updates are made to the impacted activity and the results will flow through to any product that involves that activity.
