The PCF Boom Unpacked
The PCF Boom Unpacked
The PCF Boom Unpacked
The PCF Boom Unpacked
Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) are snowballing – since May, we've seen a 4x increase in PCFs generated by our customers. To date, we’ve created 379,481 PCFs.
What is a PCF? A Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) is the total amount of CO2 associated with a product throughout its lifecycle.
Why the PCF boom?
The short answer is that Corporate GHG inventories don't cut it anymore. Reporting on high-level company-wide carbon data creates a few problems:
1. Fails to resonate with customers. Carbon baselines are too abstract for customers (retailers and consumers) to understand and make informed decisions from. Let’s face it, Scope 1-3 jargon doesn’t create a splash.
2. Obscures supply chain opportunities. Aggregating your emissions across Scopes 1-3 makes it difficult to identify targeted emissions reduction opportunities within your supply chain.
3. Limits operational action. Corporate-wide baselines don't provide enough detail to drive meaningful change. A procurement professional won’t find “Scope 3” applicable to their business activities and responsibilities.
Why is a PCF useful?
PCFs offer a more effective approach to addressing corporate sustainability challenges by:
Want to keep reading? This is an excerpt from our latest guide - so you can!
Ask an Expert
I am concerned that the PACT approach, for sharing Product Carbon Footprints, leaves too many gaps in reporting (e.g., not requiring a split between FLAG and non-FLAG, not reporting spectated unweighted values separate from total CO2e). What would your advice be to fill this gap?
Answer:
PACT (Partnership for Carbon Transparency) is designed to be industry-agnostic, with an initial focus on developing a general standard. However, they have since started collaborating with industry bodies—such as Together for Sustainability (TfS) in the chemicals sector—to define industry-specific requirements where necessary. Currently, we are working with PACT, WRAP, and Hestia to develop an agricultural data model extension tailored to the food and agriculture sector. This extension will include a breakdown of emissions aligned with the SBTi FLAG framework, as well as impacts separated out by GHG.
Answered by Piers Cooper, Sustainability Research Manager
Policy Pulse - Wasting Energy on SECR Reporting?
The Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) was introduced by the UK Government in 2019, mandating UK businesses to report on their GHG emissions and energy use. Now with newer and flashier acronyms such as CSRD, ISSB and SBTi floating around, it's easy to overlook SECR.
So let’s cover what SECR means and what you need to do about it.
Who needs to comply?
SECR applies to any large UK company with at least 40MWh of annual energy usage. This is a pretty low bar, so chances are if your company has a presence in the UK - you are covered.
There are two sets of requirements depending on whether your business counts as a:
- Quoted company - listed on a major stock exchange in the UK, US, or EU.
- Large company **** a non-listed company or LLP that exceeds at least two of these criteria: 250 employee headcount £36m annual revenue £18m annual balance sheet
This affects the reporting requirements as quoted companies must report each of their quantitative metrics for the UK and globally, whilst large companies are to report on the UK only.
What do I need to report on?
The regulation is focused on driving companies to better understand and improve their energy use and emissions. The 4 key areas of disclosure are:
- GHG emissions: What are the company's scope 1 and 2 emissions for the reporting year? This should include location and market-based scope 2, but scope 3 is optional.
- Energy use: How much energy in MWh have I consumed in my own operations this year? Crucially this includes combusting fuels in transport and on-site, as well as by electricity.
- Intensity metric: This is to make GHG emissions digestible by presenting them per some relevant unit. The default option would be revenue (£m), but any option relevant to your sector would work - such as by employee, number of stores, per product, etc.
- Energy efficiency action: This is the only qualitative disclosure, asking for what actions the company has adopted in the past year to improve energy efficiency. This is highly specific to your company but could be things such as switching to auto-turn-off lights.
Companies are also required to disclose a comparison to the previous reporting year for each of the quantitative metrics, and a methodology note for the emissions and energy figures.
What does this all mean?
SECR is somewhat unique, being older and less developed than the likes of CSRD, ISSB, and CPD, and it does not include scope 3 as a standard. This makes SECR a lot easier but then a lot less useful than its more stringent cousins. So candidly, SECR is likely to be a painful afterthought to other sustainability reporting.
The UK government is currently looking into endorsing the ISSB reporting standards, which cover all the key requirements of SECR and more. ISSB will likely become mandatory for the largest UK businesses, with all the scope 3 reporting that entails. So SECR will probably fall by the wayside to become entry-level reporting for SMEs.
Written by Dan Enzer, Sustainability Researcher
Other News
- 🇹🇷🛢️Turkey locked into LNG investments (Offshore Energy): The expansion of renewable energy has been hindered for another decade as Turkey secures two decade-long gas pipeline deals (starting from 2027). One agreement being with Shell, whilst the other with TotalEnergies.
- 🌲🇪🇺 EUDR sent afar (edie): The regulation which mandates companies, making products derived from beef, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, natural rubber, soy or wood, “to evidence that their supply chains overseas are traceable and free from illegal deforestation” has been pushed back one year.
- 🏔️🇨🇭🇮🇹 Melting glaciers lead to Swiss/Italy border changes (BBC News): With 6% and 4% of Switzerland’s glaciers being lost in 2022 and 2023 respectively, Switzerland and Italy have redrawn their borders. This clarification comes after perpetual snow melted and shifted the natural border, resulting in both countries needing to “determine which is responsible for the upkeep of specific natural areas.”
- 🇬🇧 UK’s £22bn capture pledge (BBC News): As the coal era ends projections are put forward to start storing captured carbon in 2028. The Labour government has pledged to “subsidise three projects on Teesside and Merseyside to support the development of the clusters, including the infrastructure to transport and store carbon” in the North Sea. However, concerns over the extension of the fossil fuel industry live on.
