23-03-09 12:17
Age: 3 yrs

BY: DADA, ALI; STAAKE, THORSTEN; FLEISCH, ELGAR

Greenhouse gas accounting has, until now, been an overhead process that is performed at enterprise- or plant-level for annual reporting or emission trading purposes. Companies are requiring more integration of greenhouse gas accounting and optimization into their transactional tools & systems, just as in financial accounting and quality management. Also, when companies extend greenhouse gas accounting beyond their four walls, they have to collaborate with their suppliers and treat carbon as an additional supply chain indicator to be optimized, such as time, quality, and total cost. These internal requirements, in addition to consumer pressure and national legislation, are leading to the emergence of the product carbon footprint as a supply-chain-wide environmental indicator. Several methodologies are being specified to account for this environmental indicator, either by extending the enterprise-wide carbon accounting standards or by building on available lifecycle assessment methodologies. However, the process of determining the carbon footprint of a product is still considered a major challenge since companies face a number of hurdles concerning methodology, standardization, and data collection. This paper provides an elaborate review of the carbon accounting activities both on the enterprise- and the product-levels and outlines the challenges that need to be addressed before product carbon footprinting can be adopted on a wider scale. One major challenge is the variation in lifecycle emissions due to changes, e.g. in logistics and suppliers. Supply chain fluctuations result in variable carbon footprints over time, in different selling locations, and among different instances of the same product. If these variations are tracked and integrated in the enterprise decision support systems, businesses will have more opportunities to cut environmental impact and monetary costs. Also, ecology-minded consumers may be interested to compare the carbon footprints of the products they buy with the product average. In this paper we describe scenarios where the EPC Network can be used for tracking and communicating differences in carbon footprints among instances of the same product. Finally, we give an outlook to further research in the field of product-level greenhouse gas accounting that will considerably benefit from the adoption of the EPC Network infrastructure.

<- Back to: Publications