A common challenge when calculating a product’s carbon footprint is knowing what output you actually need. Requests like “we need a carbon footprint” are often the starting point, but the real impact comes from connecting it to the underlying business objective.
By starting small and first clarifying the business objective, you can avoid overengineering your analysis, reduce delays, and ensure your results actually support decision-making. From there, it becomes much clearer whether you need a PCF, an EPD, a DPP-ready output, or simply a hotspot analysis to find where in the life cycle the biggest impacts sit.
In this episode of Behind the Product Impact, we break down how to move from product impact requests to clear, decision-driven product impact work – and how to choose the right level of analysis for your needs.
The key principles covered in this video:
- A common challenge in product footprinting
- Start with the question behind the question
- Understanding LCA outputs: Why everything starts with an LCA
- How to handle urgent Impact requests with confidence
- From first analysis to scalable impact
Video Transcript:
Pratik: EPD, DPP LCA. Would you help our viewers understand what exactly these terms mean?
Emma: Let’s say you do have an urgent request, then it’s important to keep the thing that you’re going to do about it feasible.
Pratik: Do not wait till the request becomes urgent and pressing. Proactiveness is always helpful.
Emma: Managing product. Sustainability isn’t easy. Regulations keep shifting. Expectations are changing, and the playbook isn’t always clear behind the product. Impact is our series for exactly that reality. Your front row seats to the questions best practices and operational decisions Sustainability teams face every day to understand, communicate, and improve their product’s impacts.
Emma: Hi, I’m Emma.
Pratik: Hello, I’m Pratik.
Emma: And we’re back for another episode of Behind the Product Impact. And then this one will help you figure out which product F printing output do I need for my business needs. And, also give me a little bit more explanation about what these different outputs are. So for example, DPPs, EPDs, PCFs, there’s a lot of acronyms and we’ll just dive a little bit more into them. Why we think that’s important is because we see a lot of people, prospects, for example, that are starting with this and they’re a little bit overwhelmed by having to choose which deliverable they need. And this can cause for direction changes, delays, and also just not having the right deliverable in the end. So that’s why this is a very important topic.
Pratik: Exactly. Thank you so much Emma for touching on this very important topic. And this is a repetitive topic, which comes in my discussions with prospects or customers. Most often they know they need to act now on the sustainability front, but they don’t understand what actions they need to take, you know, to fulfill their business requirements. In one of the conversations I had experienced that a sustainability manager phoned me and said: ‚Pratik, I need to have this carbon footprint ready for me, published on an EPD PO tomorrow‘.
And I said: ‚Wait, does this even make sense? What is your business requirement?‘ And then he said: ‚No, we are going for tendering‘. And then I said: ‚You might be needing EPDs and not just the carbon footprint‘. And this is something I’m seeing very often, and today we will be clarifying what exactly these things mean and how they can be used. So thank you for choosing this topic.
Emma: So if we get to the first step of this, what would you do first to start figuring this out?
Pratik: This might sound funny, but I will always start with the question behind the question. So if you are a sustainability manager and your stakeholders, maybe sales, procurement, R&D comes to you with a request like: I need carbon footprint. I will always start with the question: Why do you need this? What is the business impact or the business objective you are going to achieve with this product impact calculations? For example, if a sales guy comes to you and asks, oh, I need product impact data. What he might be looking at is complete end to end product impact calculations with verifications for external communication.
If R&D request comes to you for product impact, they might be looking at the hotspot analysis and you do not need complete end-to-end product impact calculations with verifications. So choosing your business objectives and aligning them with the reporting is a crucial step.
Emma: Super important because indeed we have seen cases of overkill in the past, and we’ve also seen cases where people went from one goal to another. Have also been in such projects, and it just doesn’t help the timeline and it also just doesn’t help the projects in the end. So totally agree.
Pratik: Yes, exactly. But now we are juggling a lot of terms. EPD, DPP LCA. Would you help our viewers understand what exactly these terms mean?
Emma: That’s a very good point. So I think maybe we start from the LCA. So an LCA is a Life Cycle Assessment. And this is the foundation of all the other outputs that we’ll discuss in this video.
So in an LCA, you do an assessment of your products or multiple products at the same time, and this will give you results and these results can go into different outputs. So maybe to start with the first output, we have an EPD, for example. EPDs are very common in the construction sector, but they can also occur outside of the construction sector.
And what an EPD is: essentially a summary of the LCA and it doesn’t contain any confidential information, so you can just share it externally without worrying about that. So it contains results, but also some descriptions about how is the model built, what is this product, and then also a photo of the products, for example. And these EPDs are usually published onto a platform. So apart from just being able to share them, they’re also available on the internet for people to look for. And in general, what’s also important about EPDs is that they’re externally verified, otherwise it can’t be an EPD. So that’s the EPD.
Then we also have the PCF, which is the product carbon footprint. And that also means that the LCA itself is more focused on product carbon footprint. So there’s some more carbon footprint indicators, and there’s also a little bit of different way of of calculating, things. And PCF reports come in various shapes and sizes. So it’s really a little bit difficult to describe these, really depends what you’re doing the PCF for. And they can be verified, but they’re not always verified. So also that is a little bit difficult. I think a place where PCFs are often mandated are the FMCG market or textiles also are doing a lot of PCFs for their sustainability reporting. And also sometimes in the construction market now with the CPR and that first warrants that people need to have PCF with their product.
Then we have the DPP. The DPP is actually a little bit something of the future. So the DPP itself would be just a digital data container, so it’s like a QR codes, and with that QR code, you can go to this place on the internet where it has different types of data about the product. And part of that would be also environmental data, which is then also based on an LCA. So that’s the DPP. This is something that’s still under development in Europe, for example. It’s based on the ESPR and also a little bit on the CPR, which then also builds on the ESPR again for the DPP. So we’ll see more of this in the future essentially.
And then finally, you can also have this internal LCA that you can share. So for example, for hotspot analysis, so identifying where does the impact come from and what can we maybe do to improve? So that is, for example, an internal way of using an LCA where you don’t need one of these other deliverables. So that’s in a nutshell, a little bit the summary of these different, ABC like acronyms.
Pratik: That’s the wonderful explanation I’ve ever heard so far. Thank you so much for explaining it. But now I have a different question, regarding the timelines. Okay. I often hear in the conversation that: Pratik it’s very urgent for me. I need to publish it because there is some tenders, deadlines waiting. Customers are asking, what do you suggest in such urgent cases?
Emma: So actually you would say maybe urgency change is the answer and we can just do something fast. But we still say take that second to figure out what is really required. Because you don’t wanna do the wrong thing. It will not get you the results you need. And it’ll also cost you probably more time. So one thing is still think about the business needs and the question behind the question. And just think about that carefully to avoid wasting your efforts. And of course, ideally you can prevent urgency. But maybe, okay, let’s say you do have an urgent um, uh, request because sometimes it happens.
Then it’s important to keep the request or the thing that you’re going to do about it feasible. So don’t strive for perfection because, perfection in general is just not possible in lCA. But also when it’s urgent, for example, use this 95/5% rule where we for the data say: 95% needs to be a really good quality and then 5% we can cover with assumptions.
Pratik: So for the viewers who are joining us, if you want to know more about what Emma is talking about for the 95/5% rule, do watch our previous video in which we explain that in much more detail what exactly the 95/5% rule is. And as I also say to a lot of my customers: Do not wait till the request becomes urgent and pressing.
Proactiveness is always helpful. It will help you to be successful in your business when you are proactive and ready to respond to the requests when they come in. So do not wait. Start proactively. Is one of my suggestions as you already highlight.
And continuing on that point actually, if someone asks me Pratik what is your rule of thumb to start with the analysis, I always say: Start small. So start with cradle to gate analysis, perform hotspot analysis and understand your product system in general really, really well. Then move from cradle to gate to cradle to grave. And from gate to grave where you do not have much of a control over data.
What happens? You make certain assumptions and then analyze that aspect later. Then we often recommend to our customers that if you are sharing anything externally, whether it is PCF, EPDs or even LCA outputs as is, do get them verified by a third party. It is necessary to get your assumptions and data verified by the third party, which will give you some confidence that the analysis that you have done is up to a certain mark.
And it’s very important when you do your product footprinting. Then, the next step, what I always recommend to sustainability managers, is check with the business requirements clearly. For example, if you want to have a carbon number, PCF would suffice, and generating a detailed EPD reports in that scenario is an overkill. So do not do that. Whereas in other way round, if you are in a CPR related, regulation driven market, you will need to start with EPDs and EPDs will serve as a foundation for your DPP, which is a future readiness in your segment. So preparing for the future starts now. That’s something I tell most of the customers with whom I have conversations.
Emma: And I also think indeed what you’re saying is the last point is also like, be strategic about this. Prevent that your wasting efforts because you’re, doing the wrong thing. And make a plan and look ahead. So for example, if you’re doing internal things, you don’t always need to verify. So verifications is really important when you’re sharing things externally, but internally, for example, that might not even help because you wanna investigate things and be able to change things. So those are also things to keep in mind.
Pratik: Exactly.
Emma: So with that, we have reached the end of this video about what product footprinting outputs to choose for your business needs and how you can identify the right one for you. So to summarize, first off, always start with the question behind the question and the business needs that you’re trying to fulfill. Then it’s also really important to understand what the difference outputs are and what the implications of them are and what you can use them for. And finally, we also talked about what to do if you experience urgency. And gave you some advice on what to choose in which situation. We will also do a more detailed blog post on this. So keep an eye out on our website. And also for new episodes of our video series check out the website or our YouTube channel and feel free to subscribe there. And if you have questions for Pratik and me, please send them over. It can be about this topic, it can be about something else. So feel free to reach out and thank you for watching
Pratik: thank you so much, Emma, for having me.
Emma: Well, thanks to you too.
