Product Carbon Footprints

The potential impact of climate change and the need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases are now recognised as critical issues around the world. The carbon footprint of ICL products in Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and the United States are in the process, or have been calculated to date. The assessment is completed in keeping with PAS 2050:2011 Specification for the assessment of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services. This is a specification developed for assessing the life cycle GHG emissions of goods and services. The PAS 2050 is similar to the ISO 14040 standards but because it is publicly available and has a supplementary guide for the calculation of horticultural products it has more relevance for the sector that ICL is predominantly in. The requirements associated with Environmental Product Declarations (or Type III environmental declarations) will be adopted for reporting purposes.  

The product carbon footprints completed to date have the following methodology steps:

• Step One: Define the goal of the study and build the process map of the product’s life cycle, from raw materials to disposal, including all material, energy and waste flows;
• Step Two: Confirm boundaries and perform high-level footprint calculation to help prioritise efforts (at this point the process map completed in step one can be updated if required with any new information);
• Step Three: Collect data on material amounts, activities and emission factors across all relevant life cycle stages; and
• Step Four: Calculate the product carbon footprint.

The product carbon footprints are completed up to the point of storage by ICL prior to dispatch to customers. The functional unit is based on mass (weight) as per kg of product. Energy, water and raw material inputs are included for each product.

An emission factor is a coefficient that identifies the global warming potential of inputs to the product carbon footprint. A variety of sources of emission factors are used for the calculations from specific factors calculated for ICL based on power station operation or product outputs, some are also received from suppliers or country specific factors (such as for energy inputs). The Ecoinvent database is also used for identification of emission factors, this is a compliant data source for studies and assessments of this type.

This approach is part of ICL’s extended product responsibility which is being implemented also with regard to climate impacts and GHG emissions. As ICL explores its value chain (Scope 3) GHG emissions, products and the impact they have during the use phase are a particular point of interest.