Scaling trustworthy carbon footprints of products to meet future automotive supply chain requirements

Many OEMs have set themselves ambitious targets for reducing CO2 emissions. This increasingly includes indirect emissions that occur along the supply chain. The impact on automotive suppliers is enormous. Transparency and trustworthy reporting of the carbon footprints of supplier parts and assemblies are becoming increasingly important.

Another challenge is scaling current calculation methods while taking into account the ISO 14067 and ISO 14040/ISO 14044 standards. Digitalization can help companies collect data, share their product carbon footprint (PCF) with others and scale all of this more efficiently and transparently. However, the current ISO standards for PCF testing limit the potential of these digital solutions, as it is difficult to verify automated PCF calculations without extensive on-site audits and individual product assessments.

In addition, the current wide range of digital solutions leads to almost infinite combinations of PCF databases, calculation methods/tools and exchange platforms, making it difficult to verify the reliability of the footprint. We will give an insight into the challenges companies face when using digital tools for sustainability and especially for PCF calculation. We will also show examples of how standardization is evolving to enable a future-proof PCF calculation and verification methodology.