Product Carbon Footprints

The Product Footprint feature calculates emissions for individual products and product types across the lifecycle stages. On Carbon+Alt+Delete, this is built on top of your existing activity emissions data from the Inventory.

You can define product types and allocation keys to determine how emissions are distributed. Activity data from your Inventory is assigned to these keys. Each entry also requires a lifecycle stage assignment.

Enabling Product Carbon Footprint

Navigate to Consultancy Settings - you will need Admin rights to access this page.

Select the company account for which you wish to enable the Product Footprint feature and turn on the Enable Product Footprint toggle.

Confirm that you are aware that this action cannot be reversed through the app and you will need to contact us to disable the feature.

Creating product footprints

Once you have activated the feature you can navigate to the Product Footprint view to begin setup.

Defining Products

Navigate to the Product Footprint in the sidebar and then to the Products tab.

Click add at the bottom of the table to create a new Product.

Click on the newly added line to open the detail pane. Then enter the details including the following fields:

• Label: A short text that will show in the dropdowns elsewhere in the system
• Description: A longer text describing the product type
• Gross Output (and its unit): The number of products created
• Sales (and its unit): The amount earned through sale of the product

At this time, only a single input is available for Gross Output and Sales per product and this will be assumed to be the same over time.

Any unit can be used for either field and you can even create a custom unit if needed.

Defining Allocation

Navigate to the Allocation Keys tab and then click Add at the bottom of the table to create a new key.

Click on the new line to open the detail pane. Enter the details in the following fields:

• Label: A short text that will show in the dropdowns elsewhere in the system
• Description: A longer text describing the key
• Products: Select any number of products as defined in the Products tab
• Product values: For each selected values, you can enter the percent of emissions that should be assigned to it when the key is assigned.
• (Read-only) Unallocated: This field supplies the difference between the sum of the Product values and 100 so that you can confirm if there is a percent of emissions that will not be allocated.

Assigning Emissions

Navigate to the Emissions Inventory.

Select an entry in the table that needs to be allocated for the product footprint and click to open the detail pane.

You will see two fields that are required for a product footprint - Lifecycle Stage and Allocation Key.

For some Activity Categories the Lifecycle Stage will be set automatically to a default value based on the typical use of the category - but this can be changed.

The Lifecycle Stage must be set in order for Product Allocation to have a value.

Select the appropriate allocation key from the list to distribute the emissions from the entry into the different products.

Reporting

The Product Footprint Export is available from the Reports view.

This export includes details of the product footprint in a few forms:

• Per product type and lifecycle stage
• Per sales and lifecycle stage
• Per gross output and lifecycle stage

The full data used for the product footprint is also included so that you can process the data as required.