Product carbon footprint glossary
The words you will meet in buyer questionnaires, footprint reports and data files, each explained in a sentence. New to the topic? Start with what a product carbon footprint is.
- CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent)
- CO₂e is a single unit that expresses the warming effect of all greenhouse gases as the amount of carbon dioxide that would cause the same warming.
- Cradle to gate
- A cradle-to-gate footprint covers a product from its raw materials up to the moment it leaves the factory gate, and stops there.
- Cradle to grave
- A cradle-to-grave footprint covers a product's whole life: materials, manufacturing, distribution, use and end of life.
- Emission factor
- An emission factor is the amount of greenhouse gas emitted per unit of an activity, such as per kilogram of cotton or per kilowatt-hour of electricity.
- Activity data
- Activity data are the quantities a product uses, such as kilograms of fabric, kilowatt-hours of electricity or kilometres of transport.
- Primary data
- Primary data are figures measured at your own site or your suppliers' sites, such as your factory's energy bills or a mill's footprint for its yarn.
- Allocation
- Allocation is the way a shared input, such as a factory's electricity, is split between the different products made with it.
- Scope 3 emissions
- Scope 3 emissions are the emissions in a company's value chain that it does not directly control, including those from the products it buys.
- ISO 14067
- ISO 14067 is the international standard that sets out how to quantify and report the carbon footprint of a product.
- PACT methodology and data file
- PACT is a methodology and a data format for sharing product carbon footprints between companies, run by WBCSD's Partnership for Carbon Transparency.
- Life cycle assessment (LCA)
- A life cycle assessment measures a product's environmental impacts across its life; a carbon footprint is the climate-change part of it.
- Biogenic carbon
- Biogenic carbon is carbon taken up from the air by plants, such as cotton, wood or paper fibre, and released again when the material breaks down or burns.
- Declared unit
- The declared unit is what one footprint describes, such as one T-shirt, one pair of shoes or one kilogram of fabric.