What is carbon footprint?

The carbon footprint is a measure of the exclusive global amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases emitted by a human activity or accumulated over the full life cycle of a product or service.

What do they mean to us?

The life cycle concept of the carbon footprint means that it is all-encompassing and includes all possible causes that give rise to carbon emissions. In other words, all direct (on-site, internal) and indirect emissions (off-site, external, embodied, upstream, downstream) need to be taken into account.

Why is this important?

Okay we all know recycling is good. But reuse and remanufacture can be even better when it comes to saving materials and energy. Having the hard evidence would help OEMs to think about the reuse and remanufacture options for their products. Remanufacturers, on the other hand, can commercialise on those benefits along with good marketing potentials for their products and services.

How we do it?

We wouldn’t like to do a very detailed Life Cycle Analysis on each product which would take many years. We rather prefer a reasonably good comparison of recycling versus remanufacture within a predefined scope for the products groups that the CRR has worked on over the years.

We will be using a commercial package, SimaPro, to do these analyses. SimaPro incorporates a very comprehensive EcoInvent database along with other databases with specific data on certain industries or location.

More Information

You might also be interested in the publications produced on Carbon Benefits.

 

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