Footprinting service scales up to bring down carbon emissions from big business

GLOBE-Net, December 6, 2011- Sustainability consultants Best Foot Forward has launched 'Product Portfolio Footprinting', a new service which enables businesses with complex supply chains and thousands of different products to quickly measure and manage their carbon footprint.

The company says the launch marks a shift from one-off footprinting studies to 'scaled-up sustainability management'. 

Best Foot Forward has been piloting this approach with organisations including Crown Paints, PepsiCo and Tesco, to help these businesses understand and reduce greenhouse gas emissions across their supply chains.

Multinational corporations are increasingly setting ambitious sustainability targets which go beyond their own operations, and require a different approach to measurement and reporting. 

Andrew Yeo, Head of Supply Chain Carbon Reduction at Tesco, said "Tesco is committed to reducing the footprint of our full product range by 30%, by 2020. Meeting this target requires rapid action across our business and supply chain, and Best Foot Forward is supporting us to measure broadly and to target key hotspots - in any and all of our product categories."

"We have been really impressed by Best Foot Forward's portfolio approach to the challenge of carbon reductions at scale," he added.

The traditional 'life cycle analysis' approach to footprinting - looking at the cradle to grave impact of one individual product in detail -  can take many weeks for each product. Using Product Portfolio Footprinting, Best Foot Forward analysed over 300 products in less than 10 weeks for Crown Paints.

Mark Lloyd, Sustainability Manager at Crown Paints noted "Our business now has detailed footprints for all of our products manufactured in the UK, and we've used the findings to set sustainability targets for the business going forward."

Crown Paints is working on its supply chain to target high carbon impacts and to see where to reduce final product footprints. Product Portfolio Footprinting gives us the ability to do this

Best Foot's Simon Miller added "When you're footprinting consumer goods, it makes sense to keep hold of materials and emissions data about each component, which can then be applied to different product ranges and combined with sales data."

"Product portfolio footprinting really represents a leap forward from the previous approach of undertaking one footprint at a time. So we're still using process data rather than financial information, it's just significantly scaled up," he stressed.