Product carbon footprints

Sooner or later a customer will send you a form: “Please provide the product carbon footprint of the items you supply to us.” It might come from their sustainability team, or land in sales, purchasing or quality. The customer needs the number because your product is part of their footprint, and they are being asked for it too.

A product carbon footprint is the simplest LCA there is: one impact category, climate change. It is also the one most people in a business will be asked for first.

What a PCF is

A product carbon footprint (PCF) is the total greenhouse gas emissions and removals over a product’s life cycle, or part of it, expressed in kg CO₂-eq per unit of product. It is an LCA restricted to climate change. ISO calls it a carbon footprint of a product (CFP); most businesses say PCF. They mean the same thing.

Most PCF requests between companies are cradle-to-gate: everything up to the product leaving your factory, including your suppliers’ emissions. The customer adds what happens next. A footprint that covers only part of the life cycle is called a partial carbon footprint.

In unit-costing terms, a cradle-to-gate PCF is your ex-works unit cost: everything it took to make the product and get it to your dock, and nothing after.

The two main rulebooks

	ISO 14067:2018	GHG Protocol Product Standard
Full name	Greenhouse gases: Carbon footprint of products: Requirements and guidelines for quantification	Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard
Published by	ISO	WRI and WBCSD (the GHG Protocol), 2011
Built on	ISO 14040 and ISO 14044	Life cycle assessment principles, consistent with the GHG Protocol’s corporate standards
Covers	Quantifying a full or partial CFP. Offsetting and communication of results are outside its scope.	Quantifying and publicly reporting a product inventory
Status	Reviewed and confirmed by ISO in 2024; the ISO catalogue lists a working draft of a revised edition	In February 2026 the GHG Protocol announced a joint working group with ISO to develop an updated, harmonised product-level standard

The two are close cousins, and a careful study can often meet both. Where a customer names one, use it. Where a sector has its own rules (a PCR, or an industry guideline), the customer will often ask you to follow those too, and they sit on top of the general standard.

ISO 14067 and the rest of this school

Everything you learned in LCA 101 applies. Goal and scope, functional or declared unit, system boundary, allocation, data quality and interpretation all work the same way. The only difference is that you calculate one indicator instead of many.

How customer PCF requests work

Customers usually ask for:

• a figure in kg CO₂-eq per declared unit (per kg, per piece, per m²);
• the boundary, usually cradle-to-gate;
• the standard followed;
• the reference period, often the last full calendar or financial year;
• how electricity was counted, and whether renewable electricity contracts were used;
• fossil and biogenic emissions separately, especially for products containing wood, paper or other bio-based materials;
• the share of primary data: how much of the footprint rests on measured data from your own and your suppliers’ processes rather than database averages;
• whether the footprint was verified or reviewed by a third party.

Then they combine your figure with others to calculate their own products’ footprints and their Scope 3 emissions for purchased goods. If your number is wrong, their number is wrong.

Exchanging PCFs: PACT

Filling in a different spreadsheet for every customer is slow and error-prone. The Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT), hosted by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), publishes two things to fix that:

• the PACT Methodology, guidance for calculating cradle-to-gate PCFs that builds on the GHG Protocol and ISO 14067. Version 3 was released on 30 April 2025;
• the PACT Technical Specifications, a common data format and protocol so that software systems can exchange PCFs directly between companies.

The idea is that a PCF travels with the product through the supply chain, with its method information attached, instead of being retyped from email to spreadsheet. The calculation behind it still has to be right: a standard format doesn’t make a bad footprint good.

Worked example: answering a PCF request for the panel

A customer asks for the cradle-to-gate PCF of the painted steel panel, per kg of product, to ISO 14067. You have the full inventory from LCA 202 lesson 1: 12.581 kg CO₂-eq per panel, cradle-to-gate, including packaging.

Hypothetical data

All figures come from the hypothetical panel inventory in LCA 202. They describe no real product.

1. Convert to the customer’s unit. The panel weighs 4.0 kg of steel plus 0.25 kg of paint = 4.25 kg (the box is packaging, not product). Per kg of product: 12.581 ÷ 4.25 = 2.96 kg CO₂-eq per kg.

2. State the boundary. Cradle-to-gate, including raw materials, inbound transport of steel, assembly electricity, packaging and production waste treatment. Scrap sent for recycling leaves the system with no burden and no credit (cut-off).

3. State the method. ISO 14067:2018, GWP₁₀₀ from IPCC AR6, reference year, source of every factor.

4. Be honest about data. Electricity use and yield are primary data from your plant. The steel factor, which is 79% of the footprint (9.928 of 12.581), is a database average. That is the obvious next step: ask the steel supplier for their own figure (LCA 202 lesson 3).

What you should now be able to do

• Explain what a PCF is, and what “cradle-to-gate” and “partial” mean.
• Name the two main PCF standards and how they relate to ISO 14044.
• List what a customer PCF request usually asks for.
• Explain what PACT is for, and what it does not fix.
• Answer a simple PCF request with the unit, boundary, method and data sources stated.

Sources

• ISO, ISO 14067:2018 Greenhouse gases: Carbon footprint of products (scope, relationship to ISO 14040/14044, review status).
• ISO, ISO/WD 14067.2 catalogue entry (revision in progress).
• GHG Protocol, Product Standard (publication and the February 2026 update on work with ISO).
• PACT, PACT Methodology V3 and WBCSD, PACT Methodology Version 3 (release date, cradle-to-gate scope, technical specifications).

Checked: 2026-09-29