CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 3740

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CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology

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Carbon footprint as environmental performance indicator for the

manufacturing industry
A. Laurent, S.I. Olsen, M.Z. Hauschild (2)*
Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Lyngby, Denmark

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Keywords:
Manufacturing
Lifecycle
Carbon footprint

With the current focus on our climate change impacts, the embodied CO2 emission or Carbon footprint
is often used as an environmental performance indicator for our products or production activities. The
ability of carbon footprint to represent other types of impact like human toxicity, and hence the overall
environmental impact is investigated based on life cycle assessments of several materials of major
relevance to manufacturing industries. The dependence of the carbon footprint on the assumed scenarios
for generation of thermal and electrical energy in the life cycle of the materials is analyzed, and the
appropriateness of carbon footprint as an overall indicator of the environmental performance is
discussed.
2010 CIRP.

1. Background

2. Comparison procedure

In the global endeavour to meet the international commitments to reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, many
companies integrate environmental issues into their management systems, with potential effects in their entire production
chains. Several tools and metrics have been developed to
measure the environmental impact of a product in the life cycle
perspective of the whole product chain. A metric that has gained
prominence in recent times is the carbon footprint (CFP), which
quanties the climate change impact of greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions in a life cycle perspective [1]. However, more
encompassing approaches exist, one of the most prominent
being a proper Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Like the CFP, an LCA
focuses on a product system, comprising all the processes
related to a product or a servicefrom the cradle to the grave. In
contrast to the CFP, an LCA assesses all the environmental
impacts of the system, not just the contributions to climate
change [2]. Considering the multi-faceted nature of environmental impacts from production systems, one may contest the
ability of carbon footprint to represent the overall environmental performance of a product. To investigate the legitimacy
of CFP as indicator of environmental impacts more broadly, a
comparative analysis has been performed of CFP and life cycle
impacts on human health, from the production of a range of
metals, chemicals, plastics and textilesall materials that are
central for our manufacturing industry.

In LCA the inventory analysis quanties the elementary ows

of the product system in the form of inputs from the environment
without prior human transformations and outputs to the
environment without further human transformations. In the Life
Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA), this information is translated via a
characterization step and aggregated to environmental impact
indicator results related to human health, natural environment
and resource depletion [3]. After the characterization, impact
category results are expressed in different metrics and can hence
not be compared across impact categories. Therefore, a normalization is performed, translating all impacts to a common unit by
calculating the magnitude of the impact indicator results
[characterization] relative to some reference information (socalled normalization references) [4]. The normalization reference
applied in this study is the annual contribution of an average
person to each impact, and the resulting common unit for all
impact categories is the Person Equivalent (PE).
The CFP typically considers the six GHGs identied in the Kyoto
Protocol, i.e. CO2, CH4, N2O, SF6, HFCs and PFCs. The normalization
reference for the CFP was calculated based on the global per capita
emission data for these GHGs in 2004 applying the latest set of
global warming potential (GWP) factors, released by the IPPC as
characterization factors [5].
Human toxic impacts (non-cancer effects) (HTI) from releases
of toxic substances to the environment were assessed using
characterization factors calculated with the USEtoxTM-model
(www.usetox.org). This model was developed as part of the
UNEP-SETACs Life Cycle Initiative and provides recommended
factors for a global assessment of human toxicity [6]. To ensure
consistency in the comparison to CFP, the normalization reference
for the HTI category was calculated for the same emission year as
for global warming, i.e. 2004.

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: mic@ipl.dtu.dk (M.Z. Hauschild).
0007-8506/$ see front matter 2010 CIRP.
doi:10.1016/j.cirp.2010.03.008

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A. Laurent et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 3740

3. Results and discussion

Both the CFP and the HTI were calculated with the LCA software
SimaProTM using the inventory data for production of materials
available in the Ecoinvent database [7], and compared after
normalization. In the comparison, the materials were divided into
four categories: metals, chemicals, plastics and textiles. Results are
shown for each category in Fig. 1.
3.1. CFP versus HTI
With some variations the HTI scores dominate the CFPs for most
of the materials shown in Fig. 1, typically with 1 order of
magnitude for plastics, textiles and paper materials and up to 2
orders of magnitude for metals and chemicals. For metals, the
relative differences vary around a factor of 10 for aluminium, steel
and nickel, 1030 for the production of solder, whereas factors of
ca. 3070 are found for the production of zinc. Copper shows more
disparate results depending on the type of production considered
(e.g. combined metal production, primary/secondary copper) with
differences varying from 5 to 70 while the inclusion of Cu in alloys
such as bronze or brass results in factors of up to 150. Overall, this
means that the CFP contributes only a minor part to the materials
full normalized environmental impact.
Nevertheless, there may well be a methodological bias in the
normalization of the CFP and HTI results as discussed in Section 4,
explaining at least part of the dominance of the HTI scores.
Whether CFP gives a small or large contribution to the total
environmental impact depends on this, and it is therefore also
of interest to decide whether the CFP results are able to predict the
human toxic impacts, i.e. whether the plotted data points show
proportionality between HTI and CFP results. This may be the case
when the two types of impacts are caused by the same activities in
the life cycle (for aluminium in Fig. 1a the production of aluminium
hydroxide), and then the CFP may serve as a good proxy of overall
environmental impact.
On the other hand, it is clear from Fig. 1, that for most of the
materials, no such proportionality is observed. For the same
material the ratio between the two impact scores may vary up to
two orders of magnitude between different data sets and then CFP
is not a good proxy of the human toxic impacts.
3.2. Inuence of energy production scenarios
A large share of the environmental impacts from the life cycle of
material production comes from the generation of thermal or
electrical energy used in the life cycle processes. Thermal energy is
generally produced by combustion of (fossil) fuels but electricity
production involves technologies of widely differing environmental impact proles ranging from renewable energy technologies and nuclear power with limited carbon footprint to coal red
power with a high CFP per produced kWh. The ratio between CFP
and HTI and hence the ability of CFP to predict overall
environmental impact may thus depend on the electricity scenario
that is used when producing the material, and this will typically
differ between countries and regions. Furthermore, a shift in
Table 1
Electricity supply source apportionment in the baseline scenario and the two
alternative scenarios.
Fig. 1. The normalized HTI scores plotted against normalized carbon footprint
scores (both in PE/kg) for a) metal production (the category Others includes,
among others, productions of lead, zinc, solder), b) chemical production (both
organics and inorganics), c) plastic production (the category Others includes
other thermoplastics, elastomers and biopolymers) and d) textile and paper
production. Each dot represents the impacts of one material viewed in a life cycle
perspective. The inserted line represents an equal magnitude for the two
normalized impact scores. Clusters located above this line represent materials
for which the normalized HTI is higher than the normalized CFP.

Hard coal
Lignite
Oil
Natural gas
Nuclear
Hydropower
Wind
Others (PV, cogen.)
a

Baseline
scenario

Scenario 1
Nat. gas

Scenario
2Wind

16%
14%
4%
16%
32%
12%
2%
1%

8%
7%
0%
28%
30%
10%
7%
3%

ca. 100%

Totals not exactly equal to 100% due to approximations and roundings.

A. Laurent et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 3740

energy technology is foreseeable as policy focus shifts towards

outfacing fossil fuels and GHG emissions.
To explore the importance of the technology mix applied in the
modelling for thermal and electrical energy production, two
alternative scenarios, were built and applied to three of the
materials: aluminium, copper (coupled production with nickel),
and carbon monoxide. The rst energy scenario, named nat. gas,
represents foreseeable changes in the electricity technology mix
replacing coal by natural gassee Table 1. The second scenario,
named wind, represents the immediate consequence of an
extreme shift of the present energy supply sources of a factory to
wind turbines as exclusive electricity source in order to investigate
the sensitivity of the results to more extreme (but still possible)
electricity scenarios. In both alternative scenarios, natural gas
entirely substitutes oil and coal in the production of thermal energy.

39

For all three materials both the HTIs and the CFP decrease in
both alternative scenarios, but Fig. 2 clearly identies three
patterns. The rst pattern occurs when the toxic impacts do not
stem primarily from energy production but from other processes in
the life cycle of the material (typically disposal of materials during
production). This is observed for the production of aluminium,
where the changes in the energy generation scenario has little
inuence on the HTI, even when all electricity is produced by wind
power plants (see Fig. 2a). In contrast, the CFP is strongly reduced,
and in such a case, the ratio between human toxicity and carbon
footprint results depends strongly on the choice of the energy
generation scenario.
The second pattern is observed for the case of copper
production (coupled with nickel). Here, the main cause of HTI is
emissions from the energy generation. While the change of

Fig. 2. The sensitivity of carbon footprint and human toxicity to changes in energy generation from the baseline scenario (used in Fig. 1) to one of the two alternative energy
scenarios for productions of a) aluminium, b) copper and c) carbon monoxide.

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A. Laurent et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 3740

energy scenario inuences the results for both indicators, the

HTI drops off more than CFP, even when electricity is supplied
entirely by wind power plants (see Fig. 2b). This is due to the
change to use of natural gas for thermal heat production. While,
the ratio between CFP and HTI for production of 1 MJ electricity
decreases by more than half from the baseline scenario to wind,
the trend is reversed when the Nat. gas scenario is used instead
of the baseline scenario, and the HTI is reduced more than
the CFP due to very limited emissions of toxic metals in the life
cycle of natural gas. For materials where thermal energy
requirements prevail over electricity requirements, the switch
of heat source to natural gas thus causes the impacts on human
health to decrease at a higher rate than the impacts on climate
change.
The third pattern is observed when the production requires
more electricity than thermal energy, and there are no
major sources of HTI in the life cycle, apart from the use of
energy. This pattern is illustrated by the carbon monoxide example
in Fig. 2c. The shift away from oil/coal/lignite as energy carriers in
the baseline scenario results in a higher decline of impacts on
human health than of impacts on climate change, which is similar
to the second pattern illustrated in Fig. 2b. The dominance of
electricity supply over thermal energy becomes obvious when the
baseline scenario is switched to the wind scenario and CFP drops at
a higher pace than HTI, thus enlarging the gap between the two
impact categories.
The three patterns observed in Fig. 2 show the strong inuence
of the energy scenario on the ability of CFP to represent HTI. When
energy production is the dominating source of both CFP and HTI,
the change in the ratio between CFP and HTI, for a replacement of
the baseline scenario by the alternative electricity scenarios,
depends on the required amount of thermal energy relative to the
electricity supply and will thus vary on a case-by-case basis. On the
other hand, when human toxicity stems from non-energy-related
processes (e.g. waste disposal during production), reductions in
GHG emissions are decoupled from toxic emissions and the ratio
between CFP and HTI will decrease when the electricity production
is changed to less fossil fuel-based technologies.
4. Uncertainties
The quantication of the global warming potentials of greenhouse gases is based on considerable scientic consensus work [5].
The resulting global warming potentials have not changed
considerably over the last 15 years and are presumably associated
with high reliability, ensuring high accuracy in the obtained
results. The same goes for the inventory of GHG emissions which
covers a very restricted number of gases and for the most
important gas among them, CO2, is based on stoichiometric
calculations form the used amount of fuel. The inventory, the CFP
results and the normalized values in Fig. 1 are thus deemed reliable
for this impact category.
The situation is different with respect to the assessment of HTI
scores. Here, the emissions, inventory for both materials and
normalization reference is associated with considerable uncertainties due to the number of potentially contributing substances
and the need to measure emissions for each of these. Also the
factors that are used to characterise the human health impacts of a
substance can be rather uncertain [6]. The HTI scores are in general
dominated by metal emissions for most of the materials which
indicates that metals are likely to be inventorized with much more
precision than organic substances. This bias in the inventory data
for the materials may be somewhat counteracted by a similar bias
in the inventory data underlying the normalization reference for
HTI [8]. Considering the relatively higher certainty of the CFP

results, this may help explain the observed domination of HTI

results over CFP results.
5. Conclusions and recommendations
For most categories of materials analyzed here, CFP scores turned
out to be dominated by HTI scores representing the impacts on
human health. Biases in the normalization applied to bring the two
impacts on a common scale for the comparison may explain some of
this dominance, but except for a few materials there was no strong
proportionality between the two impacts. CFP has thus been found to
be a poor representative of this other category of environmental
impact. Only in cases where the main sources were the same for
both types of impact there was a proportionality that meant that CFP
could be used to represent toxic impacts as well. Investigating the
dependence on the technologies and fuels used to provide the
thermal and electrical energy in the life cycle of the produced
materials different patterns were observed. Overall there was a
strong dependence on the applied energy technologies for both types
of impact, and this is unfortunate for the general use of CFP to
represent human health impacts, but potentially also other types of
environmental impact. Electricity production scenarios show large
variations between geographical regions, and although a frequent
use of coal as fuel is observed, there are notable examples of countries
that base their energy supply on large shares of nuclear power (e.g.
France and Sweden) or hydro power (e.g. Norway). The inventory of
the toxic emissions is reasonable for electricity production for which
regulations and control of uegas emission exist, but for other types
of processes in the life cycle of the materials, it must be expected to be
much more decient than the inventory of GHGs. It is likely that a
satisfactory inventory of all chemical emissions with contributions
to HTI would make the deviations between the CFP and the HTI even
larger than what was observed here.
In summary, the large variations observed among materials
both the type of material itself and the type of productionand the
poor correlation between CFP and HTI show that carbon footprint
cannot be taken to represent the overall environmental impact, let
alone the human health impacts in the choice of materials for more
sustainable production. The applicability of carbon footprint as
indicator of environmental sustainability in the design and
manufacture of products thus needs to be documented on a
case-by-case basis.
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