Cradle to gate vs cradle to grave: which one does your buyer want?

Cradle to gate

A cradle-to-gate footprint covers raw materials, their transport to you, your production and the packaging, up to the moment the product leaves your factory gate. It is the part a supplier controls and can measure, and it is what the PACT methodology asks suppliers to share.

Cradle to grave

A cradle-to-grave footprint adds distribution to the customer, the use phase and end of life (landfill, incineration or recycling). Brands use it to understand a product's whole impact and to talk to consumers about care and disposal.

How much the use phase can add

For clothing that is washed and dried many times, the use phase is large. In our catalogue, the typical T-shirt's use phase is about 30% of its whole-life footprint, and production about 47%. For a pair of trainers or a tote bag, which are rarely washed, use adds almost nothing.

This is why the two figures are not comparable. A cradle-to-grave number for a T-shirt can be well above its cradle-to-gate number without anything being wrong.

Which one to send

• If the buyer mentions PACT, Scope 3 purchased goods or a supplier portal: send cradle to gate.
• If the buyer wants the product's whole impact, for example for consumer information: send cradle to grave, and state the use and disposal assumptions.
• If you are not sure, send both, clearly labelled. Our reports show the cradle-to-grave total and the cradle-to-gate PACT values side by side.

Try it

Pick any product in our catalogue to see its footprint split by stage, or estimate your own product and switch the boundary in the full footprint form.

Questions

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