Setting up your products is the first step towards a successful Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) in the Cozero Climate Action Platform. This guide provides insight on how to create a Product profile, from choosing the right Product measurement unit to ensuring your data covers the right time period. These selections define the way your product carbon footprint is measured, what kind of data you can use, and how you can best use the results you obtain.

In this guide:

The Product measurement unit defines the product unit your PCF measures. This is an important definition, as it is the basis for all data collection and inventory results, and defines exactly what is being measured and what your result refers to. Ideally, it balances the following 3 criteria:

For physical products, this will often be expressed as weight, but it could also be for example m3 (gas products) or m2 (print advertising campaign).

In life cycle assessment methodologies, as defined by international standards such as the ISO 14044, there are typically two ways to set up the product measurement unit. These methods should always be applied to a PCF to achieve the highest quality results. The chosen approach depends on the type of product and the life cycle stages observed in the analysis.

- The analyzed product is a finished product; and
- The life cycle is analyzed beyond the cradle-to-gate boundary.
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This is a comprehensive definition of a product, as it describes the function a specific quantity of product fulfills throughout its lifetime. This typically includes the product’s intended use, the duration of the use, and the product’s performance level.

Example:

A functional unit for a laundry detergent could be “Recommended dosage of 20 ml used for washing 5 kg of dry fabric with medium-hard water”. This defines the quantity of the product and the function it fulfills.

In the analysis, you would then measure the product’s impact based on this unit, e.g., by measuring the raw materials required for 20ml setting the Use-phase assumptions to measure the energy and water consumption for a typical wash program required for 5 kg of fabric.

In Cozero, we only ask you to input the Product measurement unit in typical measurable quantities. You are free to define the function the way it best suits you. We recommend you either:

1. Define the function of the product (e.g. based on a recommended or typical use case) and then determine the amount of product needed to fulfill it; or

2. Define the quantity of the product you want to measure, and then determine the functional unit based on the quantity.

- The product is an intermediate product for which the final function cannot be defined; and
- The assessment is limited to a cradle-to-gate boundary

A declared unit only measures the quantity of the product. This can be defined based on the end-goal of the PCF analysis. If you want to share the results with your customers who have requested emissions data, you can, for example, measure the product based on the way you track sales, such as 1 kg of product. If you want to measure climate performance per packaging size, to easily review impacts of packaging design changes, you can measure the product based on the volume packaged in a bottle, e.g. 750 ml.

Whichever approach you choose, it is important you adjust all data inputs at each life cycle step to the quantity you input here. This ensures your calculations always refer to the same quantity, and your product carbon footprint gets calculated correctly.

This input defines the period to which your product carbon footprint refers to. Fundamentally, this means the time period where you collected your data from, and would reflect the year of manufacturing or sale of the product. For accurate results, we strongly recommend collecting all data from the same time period. This gives you the most accurate image of your product’s performance. In order to avoid mistakes in data collection due to e.g. abnormal production conditions, we recommend averaging data from a longer time period, e.g. a calendar year. Sometimes specific PCF standards or supplier requests require a specific time period., it is important you understand these demands and follow them.

Select the product type that your product belongs to. This is important for generating assumptions in the downstream lifecycle steps (distribution & storage, usage, and end-of-life). Your choice will lead to pre-filled data in these steps. Data for these steps is often hard to get by yourself, that’s why we offer you researched averages as a starting point.

An example: For the product type ‘T-shirts’, product research tells us that, on average, they get washed and dried 45 times, and ironed 13.5 times. We also know that, on average, T-shirts are transported over 1,200km to the warehouse and 250km more to the store, and that consumers drive 5km to that store to buy 2 T-shirts.

Do you have more accurate data? Perfect, you can simply edit or delete our averages and add your data instead.

You don’t find a fitting product type? No problem. Just leave this field blank. You can still calculate your product carbon footprint, we will just not (yet) be able to help you with researched averages.

This is a text field where you can fill in any internal naming, code, or serial number you have for your product. With the product code, you can easily find the relevant products in your Cozero product overview. You can also use bilateral codes you have defined with your customers to make communication of results easier.

One of the most important functions of a PCF is to monitor production performance over time. This includes calculating product carbon footprints on regular intervals. Regular comparative accounting can reflect any increases or reductions in emissions associated with changes implemented in the product life cycle, such as raw material inputs, production processes, or use of sold product.

Using PCFs for monitoring can result in PCFs with similar commercial names, but different PCF profiles. For this reason, it is important to track any product variances by using a unique version number. This could for example incorporate the year of product manufacturing or sale.

Emission factors, which define the quantity of greenhouse gasses emitted by a certain activity, can vary a lot based on the geographical location. This is why it’s important to define where your product is manufactured. By choosing a country in your product profile, your manufacturing inputs get automatically adjusted for regional information, such as the electricity from the selected country’s average electricity grid.

Some life cycle steps include the input of a supplier. Here you can indicate if the logged activity was performed by yourself or an external supplier. As we are working towards providing the option to link your PCF and your CCF in the future, this information is important to allocate the emissions to the correct CCF scope, Scope 1, 2, or 3. The use of suppliers also allows you to keep track of emissions per supplier and identify the most important suppliers to engage with for value chain decarbonization efforts. Additionally, you can link custom emission factors to your suppliers. This way, you can easily track the emission factors you use, and use the most accurate emission factor to account for the materials you purchase.

At the end of the PCF, you can log how many units of the product you have produced or sold, and when. With these quantities, you’ll obtain a product’s total emissions over time. We recommend you choose the same time period as the data you used to quantify your product footprint. This will help you reflect any changes or efficiency improvements in operations, and gain the most accurate insights into your production.

Regular measurement and update of products’ climate impacts is an integral part of a company’s sustainability action. This can be due to a change in the materials or the energy mix used in manufacturing, or simply updating the values for a new year. You might even simply want to update the production quantities to better keep track of your production emissions.

In Cozero, you can easily keep track of your PCFs by defining the product and PCF properties in “Product Profile”. Below we list 3 different use case examples for creating new or updating existing PCFs.

You can introduce a new product and calculate its carbon footprint by creating a new Product Name, Product Code, and Product version. You can use whichever product code or versioning numbers you want. For simplicity, in our examples we are using v1 as the first version of a product’s PCF, and v2 for the subsequent PCF for the same product.

Example inputs:

Product name: Hardshell Jacket Red

Product code: 123456

Product version: v1
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You have previously calculated a footprint (v1) for a product but want to calculate a new one, for example due to changes in data or product inputs. You can use the existing Product name and Product code, and create a new Product version, such as v2. This way, you can create a new product carbon footprint for the product, while still maintaining the original version for tracking emissions.

Example inputs:

Product name: Hardshell Jacket Blue

Product code: 123456

Product version: v2

If you are looking to add data to an existing PCF, you should maintain the current Product name, Product code, and Product version. This will change any data you input in the original PCF, while maintaining other remaining information. For example, if you wanted to update the quantities for a product for which you have a valid PCF already calculated, there is no need to create new files for any of the life cycle steps you don’t need to change; the existing ones remain applicable. You can just upload a new Quantity file with updated information.

Example inputs:

Product name: Hardshell Jacket Blue

Product code: 123456

Product version: v1

With the video below, we’ll guide you through an example.

In the next article in the Product Carbon Footprint series, you will learn how to calculate emissions at each stage of a product's life cycle.

Want to brush up on the basics? Explore our guide to setting the scope and boundary for your Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) assessment.