Data Collection (Life Cycle Inventory)
Information about the production processes and Emissions data
There are two kinds of data that a company needs to collect to calculate a product carbon footprint:
- Information about the production processes within the boundaries set out
- Emissions data, usually emissions factors
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard allows companies to make choices about the quality of the data they collect. If the company is reporting detailed data for regulation and making claims about low-carbon products to customers, then needs to be extremely accurate and seek the highest-quality data.
Those highest-quality data include primary data that the company knows and are in control of (including what you’ve purchased, what you’ve made, what you do with what you make, and the related emissions). But also includes data related to your product that don’t occur at your site, like data that your customers and suppliers have. This involves asking them to report their primary data.
Examples of primary activity data include:
- Liters of fuel consumed by a process in the product’s lifecycle.
- Kilowatt-hours consumed by a process.
- Kilograms of material added to a process;
- GHG emissions from the chemical reaction of a process.
If you are only aiming for a high-level estimate, or if you cannot fill certain data gaps with primary data, then using default data is the next best option. This involves using average emissions factors or modeling information about production processes. Such data may be publicly available or come from specialist databases.
