19-03-10 15:13
Age: 171 days

BY: DADA, ALI; RAU, ANTON; KONKEL, MATTHIAS; STAAKE, THORSTEN; FLEISCH, ELGAR

The carbon footprint of products is emerging as an important indicator for the economic and environmental sustainability of supply chains. Companies are increasingly using this measure to learn where in the value chain they can most easily and cost-efficiently reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Pressure from major consumer segments and upcoming governmental legislation are adding to the internal pressure to account for product-level environmental impact. Companies have an opportunity to leverage supply chain tracking technologies to simplify the currently costly and time-intensive carbon accounting process. Once the product environmental impact “from cradle to grave” is automatically monitored, significant optimization opportunities become transparent for companies to implement them. Additionally, retailers can use the emission and energy-related data to offer environmentally aware consumers value-adding services that directly address their information needs, at the retailer premises or at home. This paper is the second whitepaper on “the potential of the EPC Network to monitor and manage the carbon footprint of products”. The first report provided a review of carbon accounting practices on the enterprise and product levels, outlining use cases where the EPC Network can be leveraged. The paper at hand presents a prototypical implementation of an integrated supply chain scenario where stakeholders benefit from automated environmental impact assessment and communication. In one part we focus on carbon footprint calculation and particularly on the usage of EPC event data to deduce emissionrelevant parameters that are currently manually collected. In another part of the scenario we exemplify a mobile-based service that a retailer can offer to consumers who want to access carbon footprint information. The paper presents the underlying concepts and a prototypical implementation that showcases the value for companies. This lies in reduced time and money to conduct impact assessment studies, discovery of new optimization opportunities, and responding to consumer-demand for value-adding services. Early technology adopters will try to seize these opportunities, thereby acting as a market leader in their respective industries.

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