The issue of sustainability and environmental protection cannot be ignored. For this reason, more and more companies are defining clear decarbonization strategies for themselves. However, making any necessary adjustments requires an exact knowledge of a product’s carbon footprint.
This is a complex issue. After all, a product’s entire footprint is made up of many different parts of the value chain. Therefore, to obtain its final carbon footprint, it is necessary to examine all the steps that lead to the final product in detail. These individual partial “product carbon footprints” (PCFs) add up to a product’s total carbon footprint. Greiner Packaging provides its customers with information on the PCF of the packaging: As a packaging supplier, Greiner Packaging also contributes to the CO2e impact of the final product. For Greiner Packaging’s customers, these take the form of “indirect emissions.” However the next link in the value chain is not very familiar with its supplier's processes, and the exchange of environmental information is therefore becoming increasingly
important.
To calculate the PCFs of its products, Greiner Packaging has created a calculation model that links various data from internal systems, such as energy, transportation, and raw materials. The model and the calculation methodology were validated together with TÜV Austria to ensure the calculation itself and that the links to the inventory data have a solid basis. Greiner Packaging can now create product carbon footprints for the largest product groups according to the ISO 14067:2018 standard. Of course, this not only helps customers: Greiner Packaging also uses the knowledge about its products’ emissions to identify hot spots and determine suitable measures for its climate targets.
