Greenhouse gas protocol product life cycle accounting and reporting standard

Laura Draucker¹, Holly Lahd¹, Andrea Brown², Cynthia Cummis¹, David Rich¹, Pankaj Bhatia¹

¹World Resources Institute, United States of America; ²World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Switzerland

For over ten years, the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol Initiative has helped companies measure and manage their direct (Scope 1) and purchased electricity (Scope 2) GHG emissions through implementation of the Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. However, more and more companies are realizing that most of their GHG risks and reduction opportunities are related to activities outside the corporate boundary, particularly due the goods and services they buy and sell. The GHG Protocol, a joint partnership between The World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), is in the final stages of a three year, multi-stakeholder development process to publish the GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting & Reporting Standard. The goal of this standard is to provide a framework of requirements and guidance that enables companies and organizations to calculate and publicly report product life cycle GHG inventories.

The GHG Protocol prides itself on an inclusive stakeholder engagement process, which for the Product Standard included receiving feedback on it’s practically and usability from 42 companies that completed a GHG product inventory according to the draft. During this process, companies highlighted the need for an international standard to help create consistent assessments and answer requests received from customers and stakeholders for product-level GHG information. Companies also drew attention to several technical challenges where sufficient requirements and guidance did not exist, such as recycling allocation and the handling of carbon storage.

In this presentation we will discuss how the Product Standard can be used to address the needs of companies and their stakeholders and how technical challenges were met to ensure practical application of the standard. We will also discuss how the standard can be used, alone or in conjunction with other GHG Protocol standards, to advance corporate life cycle sustainability management.

GHG Management at the farm level

Emma Josephine Keller^1,2, Jon Hillier³, Christof Walter¹, Vanessa King¹, Llorenc Mila-i-Canals¹

¹Unilever, United Kingdom; ²University of Surrey, United Kingdom; ³University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom

Food manufacturing companies are increasingly interested in measuring and reducing the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts of their agricultural supply chains. A number of life cycle assessment/carbon footprinting tools, agricultural standards and certification schemes exist which attempt to do this. There is however a significant gap in our understanding of agricultural GHG emissions from the effects of management practices on net GHG releases/sequestration, and the GHG emissions resulting from the farming practices executed, e.g. tillage, irrigation etc. The challenge therefore, is in translating our scientific knowledge of agricultural GHG emissions into practical day-to-day farm management opportunities. It is this deficiency of accurate GHG data at the farm/field level that hinders robust GHG life cycle management of food products.

The Cool Farm Tool (CFT) is an on-farm quantitative and qualitative GHG management tool that aims to fill this gap. The tool consists of a series of questions to begin to describe the farming system and in doing so attempts to serve three key functions; 1) help farmers to understand and generate more robust primary GHG data; 2) allow exploration of farm management improvement scenarios and; 3) provide users with primary data capture and evidence of farm management and improvement. Currently several companies have been involved in the early stages of using this tool. Unilever, have already rolled out the tool to their fruit and vegetable supplier portfolio in a pilot study. This paper will analyze the results from the pilot phase looking specifically at: the success of supplier engagement through the tool; the quality of the initial data; and the early insights and lessons from the tool use. Finally recommendations on the implications of this level of measurement for the GHG management of agricultural raw materials will be made.

Greenhouse gas emission factors for Helsinki regions waste management

Reetta Johanna Anderson¹, Helena Dahlbo², Tuuli Myllymaa², Marja-Riitta Korhonen², Kaisa Manninen²

¹Helsinki region environment services Authority, Finland; ²Finnish Environment Institute, Finland

Preventing waste and reducing GHG emissions in municipal solid waste management is a part of the EU Life+ funded project Julia 2030 “Mitigation of and adaptation to the Climate Change in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area – From Strategy to Implementation”. The project is aiming at major GHG emission reductions by the year 2030 and among others at producing information and developing tools for cities, citizens, companies and waste management professionals for calculating GHG emissions of waste recovery and treatment.

One of the project´s goals is to develop calculators for the assessment of the GHG emissions of waste management. For this purpose, waste components specific GHG emission factors were produced using the LCA methodology. For the different waste components, the GHG emissions caused by waste management (including collection, transportation, treatment and utilization of waste) were calculated. The potential savings of GHG emissions due to the reuse of source separated waste components either as a raw material instead of primary natural resources or as energy instead of fossil fuels, were calculated as avoided GHG emissions. LCA based GHG emission factors were determined for: mixed municipal solid waste, biowaste, paper, cartons, metals, glass, energy waste (including plastics, unrecyclable paper and cartons), recycled plastics, waste of electric and electronic equipment (WEEE), wood, car tyres, construction and demolition waste, municipal waste water sludge and hazardous waste.

The GHG emission factors produced in the Julia 2030 project will be used for the development of waste management GHG emissions calculators for households, for the organizers of waste management in practice and for enterprises. The calculator for household wastes (KONSTA) is a web-based waste amount calculator, which shows households the climate impact of their wastes and compares the results to other households. The Material Flow Accounting system calculator (MARTTI) incorporates data on nearly all wastes generated in the Helsinki Region and on the ways in which waste is processed. The GHG calculator will be added to the system and the information will be used by the HSY in planning the waste management and assessing the climate impacts of it. The waste benchmarking system (PETRA) for companies and organisations in the Helsinki region enables enterprises to compare the waste volumes generated at their places of business with other enterprises operating in the same industry. The system helps organisations to improve the efficiency of solid waste management and reduce the amount and impacts of waste generated.

Carbon footprint of beverage packaging in the UK

Haruna Gujba, Adisa Azapagic

The University of Manchester, United Kingdom

The many vital functions of packaging make it essential and valuable in the sales and consumption of products and are thus produced in large quantities considering the amount of products consumed yearly. The food and drinks sector is the major consumer of packaging in the UK accounting for about 70% of the total volume of packaging consumed. With total packaging consumption estimated at about 10.2 million tonnes in the UK as at 2004, there is a huge implication on the environmental sustainability and waste generation along the packaging supply chain.

This work studies and compares the Life Cycle greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) along the supply chain of liquid beverage packaging in the UK, while also identifying the ‘hot spots’ along the supply chain. The different liquid beverage packaging materials have been obtained from retail shops and weighted while also taking into account the current, proposed and hypothetical waste management scenarios in the UK. The scope of the study encompasses packaging for five liquid beverage product categories that include milk, juice, water, fizzy drinks and alcoholic beverages. The Life Cycle GHGs have been assessed using the CML - 2001 impact assessment method and the GaBi software.

The findings of the study show that the advantages and disadvantages in the carbon footprints depend on the type of waste management, the recycling rates of the used packaging, and the sizes and weights of the containers. The carbon footprints of the packaging also show considerable differences for the same type and size from different producers/retailers due to the different weights. The results also show the production stage (raw materials and packaging production) is the major ‘hot spot’ along the supply chain of the various materials analysed in this study. Considering the different packaging materials analysed in this study, carton and plastics are the best options compared to aluminium, steel and glass due to the carbon footprint associated with their raw materials and the weights per functional unit.

Wood in carbon efficient construction: Environmental impacts assessment for the mitigation of climate changes

Francesco Pittau, Enrico De Angelis

Politecnico di Milano, Italy

The building sector is responsible for a significant share of the total primary energy use and greenhouse gas emission in Europe. Although sophisticated tools for the analysis of life cycle environmental impacts of many goods and services have been developed over the last several decades, the typical life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, widely applied on industrial products, are not easily exploitable for real buildings’ cases due to the complexity of the different processes in very different times that involved the buildings and the lack of specific databases to quantify the impacts of the different environmental indicators.

There are several reasons for the increased complexity of the environmental analysis of wood products compared to that of most other products: a long time frame is involved, a range of useful products can be obtained at different points in time, a broad array of joint products can be obtained from a tree and the unique relationship between forest development and environmental services, including climate stability.

Furthermore, the life cycle analysis of buildings is also more complex than that of many other products due to the long lifespan of most buildings, with impacts occurring at different times during the life cycle, the multitude of different variables that influence the life cycle impacts of the building and the lack of standardization of building design and construction, making each building unique.

Therefore, in order to achieve the goals of environmental sustainability it is essential to calibrate a complete analytic method specifically adjusted for these particular kind of materials and technological systems, able to support the choices of the different stakeholders during the various stages of the building design process, and to define a building management plan to minimize the human footprint and the final waste of the construction processes, optimizing the energy consumption for every stage of the building life.

Challenges and opportunities of implementing Scope 3

Andrea Brown Smatlan¹, Laura Draucker²

¹World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Switzerland; ²World Resources Institute, United States of America

For over ten years, the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol Initiative has helped companies measure and manage their direct (Scope 1) and purchased electricity (Scope 2) GHG emissions through implementation of the Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. However, more and more companies are realizing that often the majority of their GHG risks and reduction opportunities are related to activities outside the corporate boundary, particularly due the goods and services they buy and sell. The GHG Protocol, a joint partnership between The World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), is in the final stages of a three year, multi-stakeholder development process to develop the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting & Reporting Standard. The goal of this standard is to provide a framework of requirements and guidance to enable companies to measure and publicly report emissions associated with corporate value chain (upstream and downstream) activities.

The GHG Protocol standards are developed through an inclusive global stakeholder engagement process. The Scope 3 Standard has been developed through a process engaging over 160 Technical Working Group members, a 25 member Steering Committee, and been road tested by over 40 companies to provide detailed feedback on the standard’s practicality and usability. During the Road Testing process, companies highlighted the need for an international standard to: help create consistent inventories that meet business goals, address the challenge of data collection, and enable meaningful supplier engagement.

In this presentation we will discuss what business goals can be realized through the implementation of the Scope 3 Standard, and how challenges such as data collection and assurance are addressed in the standard. We will also discuss what the future may hold for corporate supply chain management practices, government policies, reporting programs and other external drivers.

Challenges and possible solutions of Scope 3 corporate green house gas accounting

Martina Prox

ifu Hamburg, Germany

The latest developments in the standardization of corporate green house gas accounting such as the current update of the GHG Accounting Protocol, which emphasize the inclusion of Scope 3 Emissions. The growing need for inclusion of Scope 3 Emissions in corporate green house gas accounting can be answered with different approaches.

The availability of data along the companies supply chains are still limited and so both big industrial associations, but also SMEs face the challenge to quantify these emissions in a feasible way. Without any doubt using primary data throughout the supply chain would be the most accurate way of quantifying scope 3 green house gas emissions. The availability of such primary data is still very limited and so most corporation start such activities with a combination of primary and secondary data sources. The question is which secondary data sources can be used and how also SMEs can get started with Scope 3 Green House Gas Accounting.

The use of secondary data does not replace the need of the creation of data collection process along the supply chain, but it serves in various ways to analyze the hot spots in the supply chain in order to draw the attention for more accurate data acquisition and in the consequence for the identification of reduction potentials to the relevant branches of a corporations supplier network.