Carbon Footprint & Lifecycle Analysis
Although measuring the environmental impact of a business have been commonplace in the chemicals industry for some time, the act of attributing resource usage to products is only gradually filtering its way through supply chains.
If your products eventually end up in places such as Walmart (Asda in UK) or Marks & Spencers, it’s probably just a matter of time before you’ll have to produce this data, so it’s worth seeing what’s required now.
CCaLC Project: http://ccalc.eu/index.htm
Manchester University have recently been at the heart of an EU project to develop a tool to allow companies to easily measure the carbon footprint and life cycle impacts of their products. More details are available through the website, but it’d be worth contacting the team if you’d be interested in getting your hands on a free copy of the beta software:
http://www.ceas.manchester.ac.uk/research/groups/sustainable/projects/carbontrust/
PAS 2050:
BSI Standards Solutions has led the development of a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) for a method for measuring the embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from goods and services. It is freely downloadable from the website here (note that CCaLC is PAS2050 compliant):
http://www.bsi-global.com/en/Standards-and-Publications/How-we-can-help-you/Professional-Standards-Service/PAS-2050/
