What companies help other companies calculate carbon footprints?
October 14, 2022 10:32 AM Subscribe
I'm working on a line of cotton products (grown and manufactured in India) and am trying to figure out what the carbon footprint would be. All I have been able to find online are websites with free carbon footprint calculators but I need an actual study around the production and processing of the cotton. Does anyone know of a company that specializes in doing this?
Best answer: This kind of thing is often known as a life cycle inventory or assessment (LCA). You might want to try searching for things like "greenhouse gas life cycle analysis consultant" to find firms that do this sort of work.
posted by zachlipton at 9:57 PM on October 14, 2022
posted by zachlipton at 9:57 PM on October 14, 2022
Best answer: You probably want a consulting firm to do this, but it'll be expensive (as it is quite a lot of work in a specialized domain).
Consider contacting SCS; they're on the upper end of things but there are a lot of fly-by-night outfits in this area, and SCS is definitely not one of those. There are plenty of people who have an LCA/LCI toolset, and set themselves up as consultants without actually knowing how to do anything other than how to use their tools.
...I would counsel you against using any of the various "LCA/LCI calculator" tools you can find online, as many of them are worse than useless unless you have extensive domain expertise yourself and can double-check their underlying assumptions. I personally have caught one of them (a reasonably famous one) making massive errors (they assumed all steel globally was produced using either a basic oxygen furnace or an open-hearth furnace -- that has been wildly wrong for literally decades, and it took over a year to convince them that they were ludicrously wrong despite the helpful intervention of three different standards agencies with domain expertise. Some people simply cannot admit that they've made a fundamental error, and doubly so if they see themselves as crusading heroes. Anyone telling a crusading hero that they've made order-of-magnitude errors in their base numbers is seen as The Enemy Who Is Wrong, not someone trying to fix anything).
posted by aramaic at 11:29 AM on October 15, 2022
Consider contacting SCS; they're on the upper end of things but there are a lot of fly-by-night outfits in this area, and SCS is definitely not one of those. There are plenty of people who have an LCA/LCI toolset, and set themselves up as consultants without actually knowing how to do anything other than how to use their tools.
...I would counsel you against using any of the various "LCA/LCI calculator" tools you can find online, as many of them are worse than useless unless you have extensive domain expertise yourself and can double-check their underlying assumptions. I personally have caught one of them (a reasonably famous one) making massive errors (they assumed all steel globally was produced using either a basic oxygen furnace or an open-hearth furnace -- that has been wildly wrong for literally decades, and it took over a year to convince them that they were ludicrously wrong despite the helpful intervention of three different standards agencies with domain expertise. Some people simply cannot admit that they've made a fundamental error, and doubly so if they see themselves as crusading heroes. Anyone telling a crusading hero that they've made order-of-magnitude errors in their base numbers is seen as The Enemy Who Is Wrong, not someone trying to fix anything).
posted by aramaic at 11:29 AM on October 15, 2022
Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions, I will look more into LCA.
posted by nolnacs at 4:02 AM on October 16, 2022
posted by nolnacs at 4:02 AM on October 16, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
Eg here is some nice research about energy usage and CO2 emission due to cotton production, but it's about production in Iran. It's possible someone has published enough already on cotton in India to get a good answer, but that's the closest I got with my available time :)
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:42 AM on October 14, 2022