A product carbon footprint quantifies the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions that a product causes throughout its entire life cycle. The purpose of this calculation is to generate transparency along the upstream and downstream supply chain, while at the same time identifying potential reductions and sensitizing producers and consumers to greenhouse gas emissions. To date, there is still no uniformly systematic, generally accepted procedure in the industry. Numerous national and international initiatives aim to harmonize the methods in order to make the calculation and communication of a product carbon footprint comparable.
This and the associated uncertainty of what will happen with the results have made many companies hesitant to publish results on product carbon footprints.
Other challenges to the determination of product carbon footprints are the significant expense for the assessment and the breadth of Merck’s product portfolio – we produce approximately 50,000 different products. Nevertheless, due to the growing importance of the topic at Merck for two product groups we have started pilot assessments of product carbon footprints to develop both a fundamental concept and a realistic approach for determining the footprint.
