A product carbon footprint, or PCF, is an emission passport of a product or service. It details what activities generate emissions for each lifecycle step.

In this article, you’ll learn

Your Cozero platform offers you two ways of logging your data and calculating your emissions:

The former enables you to gather insights into the total emissions of each location, while the latter allows you to understand how much each individual product emits, and where.

With a product carbon footprint, you will be able to:

Through tags and product codes (see below) you can organize your products and the insights provided in any way you want.

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 worries. 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.

The product unit defines what your unit for measurement will be. This is an important setting to define. Ideally, it balances the following 3 criteria:

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

This is an optional text field where you can fill in any internal naming, code, or serial number you’d have for your product. With the product code, you can easily find back the relevant products in your Cozero product overview.

If most activities related to your product’s lifecycle are taking place in one specific country or region, you can select it here. When adding log entries in the lifecycle steps, the ‘territory’ field will now automatically be filled by the choice you’ve made here, saving you time. You can always edit this value for a specific log entry if needed.

These steps guide you through the logging of data for your product. They represent the different lifecycle steps your product goes through, and help to make sure that your product carbon footprint is complete.

Depending on the type of product you are accounting for, only one, some or all lifecycle steps will be relevant. Select as many as you want or have data for. You can always change that selection later.

Some lifecycle steps include the question: “Who was the provider? ‘Me’ vs ‘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.

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

Here, 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.