Carbon footprint of a product is a sum of greenhouse gas emissions and removals in a product system, expressed as CO2 equivalent and based on life cycle assessment (LCA). The CO2 equivalent is calculated mass for comparing the radiative forcing of a greenhouse gas to that of carbon dioxide.

The carbon footprinting process and carbon calculator:

The process of carbon foot printing of a product would involve significant investment of time and resources. In this process, data needs to be collected from variety of activities such as raw materials extraction, energy and utilities consumption, transportation and disposal of waste. These primary data would be collected by the company within their operational control according to the relevant system boundary. The data collection process would be done using PDS (Product Data Sheet) form. The PDS is a series of questionnaire that covers input output data related to the life cycle of product from cradle to grave. Sometimes the secondary data (such as national average) also needs to be collected in order to characterize the upstream and downstream process for which primary data are not easy to obtain.

Since the carbon foot printing process require handling and treatment a lot of data, a framework is needed to organize and grouping the data within different categories and linked them to each emission factors to produce a final foot print. “SIRIM Karbon Kalkulator” is developed to simplify the calculation process. This toolkit use data and information from the PDS form to calculate the carbon foot prints of product based on its goal and scope definition.