Inventories of GHGs now come in two flavors, entity-level and product-level. Until recently, companies concerned with managing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (or "carbon footprint," if you prefer) refered to one or more of several protocols such as the GHG Protocol of the World Resources Institute (WRI) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in order to compile an entity-level inventory of GHGs produced within the boundaries of their organization.
However, entity-level inventories only require companies to include GHGs that are directly emitted by the company or indirectly emitted during generation of electricity purchased and consumed by the company. While tremendously useful in some applications, these sort of entity-level assessments do not reveal GHGs associated throughout the life cycle of the goods being produced, and do not permit easy comparisons between specific products in the marketplace.
TCC's Climate Conscious Assessment is a product-level GHG inventory based on the principles of process life cycle assessment (LCA). What this means is that TCC works with the companies whose products we assess to tally the GHGs emitted during the complete life cycle of their product, including production of all raw and manufactured materials, conversion of those materials into a finished product, processing of waste, product packaging, any storage and transportation of products, in-use emissions, disposal or recycling of the product, as well as immediate offset projects and any other innovative solutions of the company whose products are under assessment. Such a comprehensive audit of GHGs throughout a value chain is time-intensive and, in the end, will almost certainly entail assumptions and estimates. However, TCC's methodology will always be completely transparent and open and will strive for scientific accuracy by always using the best available data and accounting practices.
Effectively communicating the results of our Climate Conscious Assessment is critical to fulfilling our mission of informing decision-makers about the indirect climate consequences of their purchases and enabling the developing market for Climate Conscious products. TCC does not believe that telling consumers the grams of carbon embodied in a product is enough. Even with that information, it remains difficult to know whether a product's carbon footprint is reasonable. Further, while the atmosphere doesn't distinguish between molecules of a GHG, they are not equal in our economy. That is, some industries or products emit more GHGs per dollar of good produced (so-called GHG intensity) than others. For the economy of the future to be prosperous as well as low-carbon, we ought to take this into account. For these reasons, we have developed a Climate Conscious metric based on GHG intensity.
Beta-testing of the Climate Conscious Assessment is currently underway with a number of industry thought leaders and strategic partners. If your firm would like to be involved in such a trial, please contact us at:
betatrial@climateconservancy.org.
|