New method to measure carbon emissions across entire supply chain in all tiers
20th August 2008
Carnegie Mellon University researchers are urging companies to embrace new methods for following the trail of dangerous carbon emissions that are responsible for much of the world’s global warming threats, Carnegie Mellon reports.
Because there is no universally accepted way of calculating someone’s carbon footprint, dozens of carbon calculators have sprung up on the Internet in the past few years creating confusion and inaccurate information. In addition, accepted frameworks for tracking industry carbon emissions rely on “tiers” of increasingly broad scope. Tier one generally includes emissions by the company’s own activities, such as burning gasoline in fleet vehicles or natural gas in its facilities. The second tier boundary expands to include emissions from electricity and steam purchased by the company. Tier three includes all other emissions, including the entire supply chain of goods and services.
In practice, most companies reporting their greenhouse gas emissions opt to use only tier one or the tier two boundary. To put the implications of this boundary decision into context, Carnegie Mellon researchers H. Scott Matthews, Chris T. Hendrickson and Christopher L. Weber, have developed a new method that estimates the amount of greenhouse gas emissions across all tiers of the entire supply chain for all industries, read more.
