BASF to calculate full product carbon footprint

BASF has announced plans to provide total product carbon footprints (PCFs), measuring CO₂ emissions for all of its 45,000 sales products. It has been doing this for individual products since 2007 and, using an in-house digital system, will do this for the full range by the end of 2021.

The PCF comprises all product-related greenhouse gas emissions that occur until the BASF product leaves the factory gate, from the purchased raw material to the use of energy in production processes. By calculating this, said Christoph Jäkel, head of corporate sustainability, it will be able to “support customers with reliable data so that they can achieve their climate targets”.

The approaches used include BASF’s biomass balance approach, in which fossil resources are replaced by renewable raw materials from organic waste and vegetable oils in the production verbund and mathematically allocated to the sales product. This has already been used in the ChemCycling project, in which post-consumer plastic waste is recovered for use in raw materials for new plastics.