PAS 2050: Carbon Footprinting Products

PAS 2050 is a publicly available specification for assessing product life cycle GHG emissions, prepared by BSI British Standards and co-sponsored by the Carbon Trust and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). PAS 2050 is an independent standard, developed with significant input from international stakeholders and experts across academia, business, government and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) through two formal consultations and multiple technical working groups.

Carbon Trust: Guide to PAS 2050

‘Carbon footprint’ is an increasingly common term used to describe the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by a particular activity or entity. Understanding these emissions, and where they come from, is necessary in order to reduce them. Until recently, businesses wanting to measure their carbon footprints have focused on their own emissions, but now they and their customers are increasingly concerned with emissions across their entire supply chain.

Though PAS 2050 is a free and publicly available methodology but implementation can be fiddly and time-consuming. Provenance offers support to businesses interested in using PAS 2050; we can either manage the whole process for a given product or range of products or work with you to train staff and set up your own assessment systems.

What are the benifits of PAS 2050?

As outlined in the PAS 2050 Guide, measuring the carbon footprint of products across their full life cycle is a powerful way for companies to collect the information they need to:

• Reduce GHG emissions
• Identify cost savings opportunities
• Incorporate emissions impact into decision making on suppliers, materials, product design, manufacturing processes, etc.
• Demonstrate environmental/corporate responsibility leadership
• Meet customer demands for information on product carbon footprints
• Differentiate and meet demands from ‘green’ consumers

More specifically PAS 2050 can provide companies with:

• Internal assessment of product life cycle GHG emissions
• Evaluation of alternative product configurations, operational and sourcing options, etc. on the basis of their impact on product GHG emissions
• A benchmark for measuring and communicating emission reductions
• Support for comparison of product GHG emissions using a common, recognised and standardised approach
• Support for corporate responsibility reporting their products and to identify emission reductionopportunities

For customers (if companies choose to communicate their product footprints), it provides:

• Confidence that the life cycle GHG emissions being reported for products are based on a standardised, robust method
• Greater understanding of how their purchasing decisions impact GHG emissions

Further information and detail about PAS 2050 can be retrieved from the BSI website here