What it takes to scale PCFs: 4 takeaways from our webinar with Climatiq

Product carbon footprints (PCFs) are rapidly becoming business critical. For manufacturers, product-level carbon data is increasingly needed to respond to customer requests, engage suppliers, participate in procurement processes and demonstrate progress on decarbonization. Regulatory developments are adding to that pressure, while companies working toward net-zero and science-based targets increasingly need better data on the products they source.

But creating one PCF is very different from producing credible, consistent PCFs at scale across a portfolio that may contain thousands of products.

In a recent joint webinar, experts from Climatiq and SustainCERT explored what it takes to scale credible PCFs, the challenges companies face along the way, what verifiers look for, and how calculation and verification can work more closely together.

Here are the main takeaways from the discussion.

Watch the full webinar below:

1. The challenge: Producing credible PCFs at scale

As demand for product-level carbon data grows, manufacturers face a practical question: how do you move from calculating PCFs occasionally to producing them through a repeatable process across an entire product portfolio?

Three challenges come up again and again:

1. Data availability: The information required to calculate a PCF is often fragmented across an organization. A bill of materials might sit with procurement, transportation data with logistics, and manufacturing data elsewhere in the business. Bringing those inputs together at product level can require significant time and coordination.

2. Methodological complexity: Companies can draw on standards including ISO, the GHG Protocol and PACT. But translating those requirements into consistent decisions for a particular product still requires interpretation.

3. Selecting the right emission factors: Individual materials and components need to be mapped to appropriate emission factors, which can come from a wide range of databases. Selecting the right factor—and documenting why it is appropriate—can quickly become a time-consuming exercise.

These challenges become ever more significant when a company moves from calculating a handful of PCFs to producing them across a large and diverse product portfolio.

At that point, the point is no longer to simply calculate a PCF. Companies need a repeatable approach that can consistently turn data and methodological decisions into reliable product carbon footprints.

2. You don’t need perfect data. You need defensible choices

One of the most useful insights is also one of the simplest: a credible PCF does not require perfect data.

Primary data should be used as much as possible. But in real-world value chains, some information will inevitably be difficult, impractical or impossible to obtain. In those situations, appropriate secondary data can be used.

From a verification perspective, the more important question is whether the choices behind the footprint can be explained and defended.

When reviewing an emission factor, for example, a verifier will consider whether it meets the relevant criteria and standards, whether it is appropriate for the product or process it represents, and how material that particular factor is to the overall footprint.

There will always be opportunities to improve the quality of a PCF as better data becomes available. Trying to understand every element of a product down to the smallest possible level, however, is unlikely to be practical.

Credibility therefore comes from making reasonable choices, applying them consistently, and being transparent about how and why those choices were made.

3. Verification is about much more than checking the final number

PCF verification can serve multiple purposes. It can help build trust with customers by providing independent assurance over product carbon data. It can support companies that have made changes to reduce the emissions of their products and want credible evidence of those improvements. PCFs can also contribute to Scope 3 inventory accounting, providing a credible basis for measuring the overall emissions of a company.

It’s tempting to think of verification as a final check of the result: is the carbon footprint number correct?

In practice, verification looks much deeper. It helps establish whether the data, methodology, and decisions behind the numbers can be trusted.

For an individual PCF, verifiers may examine:

• The data going into the calculation
• System boundaries
• Data quality
• Allocation methods
• Functional units
• Methodological decisions behind the study

They also look at whether those decisions are relevant, consistently applied and transparently documented.

This is particularly important when PCFs are being produced at scale. The more footprints a company creates, the more important it becomes to have consistent methodologies, documented decisions and processes that can stand up to scrutiny.

4. Audit readiness should start at PCF creation

Since verification examines the assumptions, data and methodological decisions behind a PCF, preparing for verification only after the calculation is complete creates unnecessary work. Teams may have to go back and reconstruct why particular decisions were made, locate supporting documentation or clarify where individual data points came from.

A more scalable approach is to build audit readiness into the PCF creation process itself.

Climatiq and SustainCERT have partnered up to make this easier by connecting calculation with verification.

Verification remains a rigorous process. But when companies generate large numbers of PCFs using a consistent methodology, not every element necessarily needs to be reviewed from scratch for every footprint.

One way to reduce repetition is through systematic validation, or methodology assurance. Where a platform generates large numbers of PCFs using a consistent methodology, parts of that underlying system and methodology can be assessed in advance. Individual PCFs produced through that validated system can then be verified with some elements already reviewed.

The aim is not to reduce the rigor of verification. It is to make the overall process more scalable by connecting PCF creation, methodology and assurance from the start.

By bringing calculation and verification closer together, companies can create a more seamless workflow from generating PCFs through to assuring and ultimately sharing verified carbon data with customers and partners.

Credible carbon data to share with your partners

As PCFs become more embedded in procurement, supplier engagement and customer relationships, manufacturers will need to think differently about how they produce them.

Scaling PCFs is not simply about automating calculations. It is about creating repeatable processes in which data, methodology, documentation and verification work together, so companies can generate product-level carbon data efficiently while maintaining the transparency and rigor needed for that data to be trusted.

That is the foundation for producing verified PCFs at scale and sharing credible product carbon data with customers and partners.