Calculating the environmental footprints of our products

Assessing the environmental footprint of our products is an important element in understanding our overall value chain emissions.

This is why we worked closely with industry peers and the Brewers of Europe to co-develop the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) for beer. 

These rules underpin the European Commission’s product environmental footprint (PEF) guidelines and provide a methodology for assessing the environmental footprint of different beers and their packaging. The guidelines consider 16 environmental impact categories, such as land use, smog formation, climate change, and acidification, and cover the full life cycle of the product. The rules are put into practice through an online tool, which we use to calculate environmental footprints for specific products. We then use the results for internal awareness and sharing with our customers.  

Making a public claim about a product’s environmental footprint requires a high degree of accuracy, and therefore, a lot of data must be collected from our suppliers. But when primary data isn’t available, we use secondary datasets, known as life-cycle inventories, as defined by the PEF guidelines.  

In regards to the life-cycle impact of packaging, for example, the PEF guidelines provide a detailed methodology which distinguishes between the impact of recycled content in our packaging and the recycling of our packaging after use. These calculations ensure that the environmental benefits of each area are not double counted. 

Some of our markets are actively using this assessment tool to gain insights for their innovation pipelines and packaging strategies, as well as to help their customers understand the environmental footprint of products. This way, customers such as music festivals, supermarkets, and bar-chains gain insights on their value chain footprint through primary data from Carlsberg.