The Circle — Ecochain Roundtable Sessions
Both sides of the data request: suppliers, customers and product footprinting
A small-group conversation for the people sending footprint data requests — and the people receiving them.
Somewhere right now, a sustainability lead is drafting an email asking a supplier for process data. And somewhere else, someone at that supplier is opening a similar email, looking at a spreadsheet they don’t recognise, wondering who’s supposed to fill it in and what happens if they don’t.
This session hears both sides.
If you’re the one asking, you know the pattern: requests go unanswered, spreadsheets come back half-filled or full of numbers nobody can trace, and if you’re not a major account you have little leverage to push with. Most of your product’s impact sits in someone else’s factory, and your LCA rests on data you can’t generate yourself.
If you’re the one being asked, the pattern looks different: requests arrive from multiple customers in multiple formats, asking for things in units you don’t measure, on deadlines nobody discussed with you. Some of it is commercially sensitive. Some of it you’d happily share if you knew what they actually needed or if answering once meant not answering the same question five more times this quarter.
Both sides want the same outcome. The friction is almost never bad faith; it’s mismatched expectations, formats and effort. So we’re putting both in the same room.
What you might bring to the table
The Circle runs on the questions people show up with. A few that would land well in this one:
If you’re requesting data
- „How do I actually ask?“ the templates, formats and framings that get a usable response instead of silence, and how much hand-holding suppliers really need
- „What do I do when nothing comes back?“ working with proxies, regional datasets, worst-case assumptions or a distribution across suppliers, and being honest about it in the model
- „How do I get taken seriously as a small account?“ when your suppliers are large, your volumes aren’t, and footprint questions go to the bottom of their pile
If you’re being asked for data
- „What are they actually going to do with this?“ understanding what’s behind the request, and which numbers genuinely change the answer
- „How do I answer once instead of twenty times?“ building something reusable rather than a bespoke response to every customer’s spreadsheet
- „Where’s the line on confidentiality?“ what you can share, what you can aggregate, and what a footprint figure does and doesn’t reveal about your process
For everyone in the room
- „How do we stop starting from scratch?“ what PACT, CPR and the DPP framework will and won’t solve, and what to build in the meantime
- „How do we know the data is any good?“ quality, traceability and verification, when there’s no mandate forcing anyone to be precise
- „How do we model this without over-engineering it?“ structuring models so multiple suppliers, changing sourcing and different transport routes are parameters, not rebuilds
Bring the one you’re stuck on. That’s the session.
How it works
The Circle is Ecochain’s peer roundtable series: small, focused, and off the record. Every session is co-hosted by Ecochain, navigating real customer challenges. No slide marathon, no recording: just practitioners comparing notes on what is and isn’t working.
🗓 Tuesday 22 September 2026 · 12:00–13:00 CEST · Google Meet · Max 20 seats
Seats are limited to keep the conversation genuinely interactive. Once it’s full, it’s full.
[Reserve your seat →]
