PepsiCo Teams With University to Develop High Speed Carbon Calculator

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October 11, 2012

PepsiCo teamed up with Columbia University’s Earth Institute to create a carbon calculator that can measure the carbon footprint of thousands of products simultaneously.

For a company such as PepsiCo with more than 20 brands and hundreds of consumer packaged goods products, such a tool could save enormous amounts of time and money.

The tool can calculate the carbon emissions of different materials and activities in a company’s supply chain and operations, and within minutes pinpoint which of these carries the largest carbon footprint, according to a Green Biz report.

“The objective was to give companies several capabilities at once with only a single effort,” said Christoph Meinrenken, the tool’s lead researcher and associate research scientist at the Earth Institute.

The tool was developed to follow publicly known carbon footprinting standards such as the GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) standard and PAS20:2011, according to the report.

“We saw the opportunity to use our carbon/greenhouse gas analysis as a base for building a broader decision-making tool that could help us identify other efficiency opportunities throughout our supply chain, drive innovation and improve our overall operations,” said Robert TerKuile, PepsiCo’s senior director of environmental sustainability.

The tool also provides certifiable product footprints to be used in ecolabeling and for environmental measuring groups such as The Sustainability Consortium and GoodGuide, according to the report.

Earlier this year, Danone announced it had developed a system, in partnership with SAP, that can calculate the carbon emissions of individual products.
"No company in the world has yet been able to footprint all of its products," Meinrenken said. "In this sense, we see our software not as a tool to do company-wide product carbon footprinting faster and cheaper, but indeed to do it at all," he said.

The tool "dramatically reduces the time and effort as well as required LCA expertise that company employees or outside consultants have to spend on the tool and its associated databases before it can spit out any meaningful carbon results," PepsiCo’s TerKuile told Green Biz.

Read These Related Articles:

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• Stop & Shop Outlines Carbon Reduction Progress
• Weis Markets Reduces Carbon Footprint by 15 percent

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