German chemical company BASF is providing its customers with carbon footprint information about all its products in a move to providing greater transparency and allowing customers to lower their CO2 emissions.
Photo: Sven Cipido / Flickr Licence: CC BY-NC-ND
All 45,000 BASF products are having such information revealed publicly.
Sustainability and digitalisation are a priority for BASF, and their approach relies on data from the BASF Verbund and a new digital application, with the company’s new Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) as the result.
This report comprises all product-related greenhouse gas emissions that occur until the product is shipped to the customer and covers all areas, from the purchase of the raw materials to the use of energy in production.
The PCF calculation is based on emission data collected in its production network and high-quality average data for purchased raw materials and purchased energy.
The methodology follows general standards for life cycle analysis such as ISO 14044 and ISO 1067 as well as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Product Standard.
BASF is committed to introducing this on an industrial scale to provide a level playing field for all companies.
Martin Brudermüller, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of BASF SE, said: “By calculating the CO2 footprint, we bring both together and create much greater transparency for our customers regarding the specific emissions for each BASF product.
“This enables us to develop plans together with our customers to reduce CO2 emissions along with the value chain up to the final consumer product.”
BASF has been calculating PCFs for individual products since 2007, but the new digital solution makes it possible to calculate these emissions on a global level.
They are looking to start reporting on selected products in the coming months with plans to make PCF data available for their entire portfolio by the end of 2021.
They hope that with this data, customers will be able to identify how they can best avoid greenhouse gas emissions.
The German company has also worked to reduce the individual carbon footprint for various products, through the use of a mass balance approach. For example, biomass replaces fossil fuels in the production of Verbund and allocated to the product based on mathematical simulations.
In another product, ChemCycling, the first commercial quantities of products for whose production chemically recycled plastic waste was used as a raw material at the beginning of the value chain became available earlier this year.
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