Carbon Footprint Flashcards
What is the carbon footprint?
Basically…LCA with focus on one impact category: climate change
Different definitions, concepts, approaches and labelling schemes in different countries, e.g. in the UK, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland, Swed
SO 14067, PAS 2050 and the GHG Protocol are the main standards (all are build on ISO 14040/44 ) on how to conduct a carbon footprint study
What is the product carbon footprint (PCF)?
Measures and communicates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to goods and services
What is biogenic carbon?
Emissions and intake related to the natural carbon cycle
biomass carbon (a tree) takes CO2 in from the atmosphere and releases it when it dies (uptake & release cycle)
the opposite are fossil fuels that only release CO2 into the atmosphere
How can only an uptake of CO2 be enabled?
e. g. by afforestation
- -> plant trees
What are the challenges of afforestation?
Making sure that the trees are not cut down in a few years –> delayed emissions
How long does the tree have to be in nature to account for it?
Different according to different standards/ initiatives
–For example:
»ISO 14067 does not allow it
»PEF: 100 Years
»Gold standard: 100 years
Why should renewable plastic or biobased material instead of fossil plastic be used?
Both plastics produce/release CO2 but overall renewable plastic produces less:
It extracts CO2 from the atmosphere when being produced and in the use phase. In the end of lifetime, the CO2 is released again but no additional CO2 is produced.
The impacts vary depending on the application and the material types.
It’s important to account for renewable(biogenic) and fossil carbon separately to show the different impacts.
What is important for the life cycle inventory of Carbon footprints?
Treatment of specific GHG emissions and removals, e.g. fossil and biogenic carbon have to be documented separately;
Carbon stored in products does not account for removal, but has to be documented
–Land use change (direct) is assessed according to existing methods; indirect land use change is not accounted for
What are the benefits of carbon labels?
-Communication to consumer
–Improvement of production processes
What are environmental labels and declarations?
- provide information on the environmental characteristics of products
–Serve different communication purposes
- -> different formats exist
- -> (B2C/B2B)
- -> comparison
- -> identification of a product with the least environmental impact
- -> standardisation of own labels
- several ISOs exist
What is a corporate carbon footprint?
…a greenhouse gas balance of a company including the value chain
• …Scope3! ( →withoutScope3 it is not a footprint)
Scope 1: how much energy do the company facilities use, what kind of vehicles,.. (focus on company itself)
Scope 2: indirect emissions due to purchasing electricity, heating and cooling,etc–> mostly electricity (upstream activities)
Scope 3: indirect emissions for the entire value chain: purchase goods and services, business travel, employee computing
What is the difference between type I and type II labels=
Type I is based on third party certification
