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Memorandum Product Carbon Footprint

Ambitious climate targets can only be met through a massive, worldwide reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For industrialized countries such as Germany this means reducing GHG emissions by up to 95% from their 1990 level by the year 2050. If this is to be achieved there must be major changes in products and consumption patterns - in product development, production and marketing as well as in product use. To identify ecologically and economically efficient ways of progressing towards this target, it is essential to analyse the climate impacts of products and consumption patterns.

The work on product carbon footprinting and CO2 labelling carried out by Britain’s Carbon Trust and also by Tesco, the largest retailer in Britain, has driven forward the necessary discussion on product-related climate change mitigation and product carbon footprinting (PCF) both in Europe and worldwide, and has highlighted the issue of CO2 labelling.

At the start of 2008 Tesco announced that it would measure the carbon footprint of all the 70,000 products that it sells and pursue carbon labelling for its products. Shortly afterwards it restricted the focus to its 1,500 own-brand products and also extended the implementation time frame. Around 100 products have now had their carbon footprint calculated and been labelled accordingly.

Worldwide there is now a large number of state-run and privately organized product labelling schemes and several dozen PCFs have been published (e.g. by the PCF Pilot Project Germany1). From this, two key issues arise:

Firstly, there is an urgent need for developing internationally binding, harmonized standards and guidelines for the methodology of the product carbon footprint.

Secondly, the purpose and usefulness of CO2 labelling is viewed very differently by the various stakeholders.

The British Standards Institution (BSI), in collaboration with the British Department for Environment (defra) and the Carbon Trust, has produced a Publicly Available Specification 2050 - Specification for the assessment of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services. This British pre-standard sets out an initial comprehensive proposal for the methodology of the product carbon footprint, thus contributing to the international debate on this issue.