Sustainability
Partnerships for Product Carbon Footprint methodology
BASF’s methodology and proprietary digital solution for product carbon footprint calculation has proven its usability beyond our company’s scope. We have shared it with partnering software houses via licensing agreements. Based on BASF’s methodology, our partners develop software for implementation at third parties.
Steering the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions towards net zero requires the identification of reduction potential in value chains. Gaining transparency with carbon footprint on product level is an essential precondition to work towards that goal. BASF has therefore developed a proprietary digital solution to efficiently calculate product-related cradle-to-gate carbon footprints (PCF) leveraging primary data. BASF’s solution enables the company not only to provide accurate and granular PCFs for its sales portfolio, but also creates unparalleled transparency in what is driving greenhouse carbon emissions in its manufacturing footprint and raw material purchasing basket.
Dr. Martin Brudermüller
Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of BASF SE
To protect the climate, we must adapt the way we travel, heat our homes, eat, or take purchasing decisions. But understanding how our actions can make an impact isn’t always easy. Despite ISO norms, there are no sufficient standardized specifications to determine product carbon footprints (PCFs) for individual products. In the absence of such detailed rules, PCFs of the same products from different companies cannot yet be fully compared.
To help customers better understand the impact of choosing one product over another, we at BASF developed a powerful digital solution to calculate the cradle-to-gate product carbon footprints (PCFs) for our 45,000 sales products. The result? We learned that calculating the PCFs for chemical products is complex, but feasible – with the help of trustful emission data, an unbiased calculation methodology, and a powerful digital solution. The data also provides insights that help identify emission reduction potentials.
In essence, industries will need to align on shared methodologies and manufacturers will need to embrace the principle to share their product carbon footprint data with their partners along the value chain. Our BASF contribution to this: We made our digital solution available in the market by licensing it to software houses. They are now supporting other companies in determining the carbon footprint of their products and in better understanding their emission drivers. At the same time, we are actively engaged in numerous industry and cross-industry consortia to foster the alignment on a common lifecycle assessment methodology as well as to establish data exchange mechanisms and platforms. Because only with the correct information at hand can we take effective action.
The digital solution has proven its usability for calculating transparent emission data for the entire BASF portfolio of approximately 45,000 products in the complex chemical value chains.
Flow of BASF's method and digital solution to efficiently calculate product carbon footprints - from primary data, to data consolidation and ISO compliant CO2 allocation on product level to transparency on PCFs and emission drivers.
As the existing PCF calculation standards leave room for interpretation and allow different ways of emission allocation, BASF has gone one level deeper in defining additional prescriptive criteria in its PCF methodology, to enable a more uniform lifecycle assessment result. Only if industries follow the same methodology, PCF values will be comparable. BASF believes that its digital solution and methodology can help industries to create a level playing field.
TÜV Rheinland has certified that BASF’s method to calculate cradle-to-gate product carbon footprints is in line with the relevant international standards*.
BASF is now sharing its methodology and digital solution in the industry via an ecosystem of partnerships:
- We have licensed the software solution to a number of software houses.
- We are actively engaging and supporting our extensive supplier network.
- We are contributing to various initiatives in industry and cross-industry associations.
* ISO 14067:2018 https://www.iso.org/standard/71206.html and Greenhouse Gas Protocol Standard https://ghgprotocol.org/product-standard
Partners for product carbon footprint calculation software
To offer a pragmatic solution to interested industry players, BASF has decided to make its automated PCF calculation approach available in the market via an ecosystem of partnerships. In a first step, licensing agreements will enable IT companies to translate BASF’s methodology and in-house solution into a marketable software.
These software companies have licensed our digital solution with underlying PCF methodology:
The listed partners are licensees of BASF's digital solution and methodology. BASF does not hold any warranty of liability nor will carry any expenses for the services provided.
Partner for product carbon footprint data
To enhance the consistency levels of product carbon footprint data whenever primary data for raw material PCFs are unavailable, and to foster the establishment of a common standard, BASF supports secondary Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data providers offering datasets aligned with BASF’s PCF methodology.
This company provides PCF datasets in line with BASF's methodology:
