Comparison Of Product Carbon Footprint Standards And Analysis Of Their Influence On Supply Chain

Along with the rapid development of global carbon label system,the product carbon footprint will become an essential factors of trade supply chain.However,a wide range of product carbon footprint accounting standard can lead to communication barriers between carbon labels.Analysis of the differences between the product carbon footprint standards and their influence on carbon footprint calculation can provide a scientific basis for the exchange of carbon labels and the selection of products and trade supply chain.This paper compared and analyzed the three international product carbon footprint standards qualitatively:PAS2050,GHG Protocol and ISO 14067,and mainly identified 15 different points.By analyzing their range of influence,this papper selected 3 points with the wide and general effects to do quantitative analysis:the production of fixed assets,the operation of the place and power infrastructure.As for the three points,GHG Protocol require to account all their contributions,which can lead to the most accurate result,while PAS2050 and ISO14067 only consider the contributions of operation and power infrastructure,respectively.This paper selected the paper,PET and steel as case products,and identify their manufacturing supply chain,made the detail inventroy anaylsis for three case products based on Simapro software,and calculated the their product carbon footprints with three standards:for paper,PET and steel products,the maximum error lead by different standards are 8%,12%and less than 3%,respectively,which indicated that compared with steel,paper and PET are more sensitive to the differences between three stardards.Based on different scenarios of using standardars in trade supply chain and the trade volume,calculating the influcences of different standards' on product carbon footprints and the carbon emissions of trade supply chain in each scenarios,the results illustrated that,for paper products,PET and steel,the maximum error on trade carbon emission caused by standard's differences are:5679 ktCO2eq,3274 ktCO2eq and 8 ktCO2eq,respectively,and 8961 ktCO2eq in total,which is equivalent to 6%of the annual carbon emissions of the average EU country in 2018,equivalent to about 260 million U.S.dollars in carbon tax,and nearly 70 million U.S.dollars in carbon trading price.The influence of standards' differences on product carbon footprints is considerable according to both the qualitative and quantitative analysis.Among three standards,PAS2050 and ISO14067 may lead to more uncertainty in carbon footprint calculation,but with higher competitive advantage from perspective of the economic benefits in carbon labels,carbon tax and carbon trading market.