Covestro, which develops sustainable chemical solutions including adhesives, has developed an app for product carbon footprint calculations. The company’s climate impact in the manufacture of its products can be assessed using the product carbon footprint from cradle to gate — which can be calculated automatically for about 50,000 intermediate and finished products.
Covestro’s investments in digitalization aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions show its commitment to making the circular economy a reality and becoming operationally climate-neutral by 2035.
Currently, the results are being validated to make them available to customers in 2024. In the meantime, Covestro continues to deliver data from a manual process using a life-cycle assessment tool and a method that was certified according to ISO 14040/44 and ISO 14067 last year by TÜV Rheinland Energy.
The automation of the calculation enables Covestro to determine the specific carbon footprints for products in its entire product portfolio and identify potential options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Additionally, the company plans to provide its customers in future with data on the products for sale, thereby contributing to an emissions assessment and a potential subsequent emissions reduction on the customer’s side.
In addition to the carbon footprint, the digital solution enables the calculation of other environmental impact categories, such as the acidification or photochemical ozone creation potential.
The calculation considers emissions of raw materials used, energy consumed, direct emissions generated, and waste streams generated during the manufacture of a product. The calculation is based on Covestro’s internal plant and site-specific data as well as external databases (e.g., for raw material data and, if available, specific raw material data from suppliers).
The data that is calculated includes intermediate and finished products, meaning that the entire value chain for the products all the way to the Covestro gate is taken into account.
“We all want and need to reduce emissions along the value chain — this applies to us at Covestro just as much as it does to our suppliers and customers. Our customers’ requirements are clear: to provide data for all our products and to identify opportunities to reduce emissions,” explains Lynette Chung, chief sustainability officer with Covestro.
Digitalization sustainability
Covestro has now taken a major step forward in automated calculation. Information on material and energy consumption is pulled from existing data sources and systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), and merged with data from databases in the cloud.
Covestro uses the Product Sustainability Platform from AllocNow GmbH for this purpose. The software company specializes in the automated calculation of life cycle assessments for chemical products. In the future, further supplier data could be reflected in the calculation.
“By combining and using the data, we can now calculate greenhouse gas emissions in production for a single product,” says Michaela Lentz, IT & digital transformation partner for sustainability at Covestro and IT lead for the project. “Annual recalculations and future process changes can be retrieved at the push of a button, so to speak. Our software solution has been developed directly in the cloud.
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