Cooler’s Approach to Carbon Footprinting

Cooler uses a hybrid approach to carbon footprinting based on a combination of two major analytical techniques:

Input-Output (I-O) Analysis uses extremely detailed economic data gathered by the government to allocate emissions across the whole economy. As a result, this is the most comprehensive, conservative, and accurate way of calculating the global warming impact of purchases.

For example, let’s look at gasoline. If we only looked at the emissions from your tailpipe, each gallon of gasoline would emit about 19 lbs. of CO2. But I-O analysis also accounts for the whole gasoline industry, including everything from the emissions of refineries to the air travel of oil industry executives, leading to a value of 23 lbs of CO2 per gallon. In this way, Cooler’s calculations capture as much of the emissions related to your purchases as possible.

Lifecycle Analysis (or Process Analysis) is a detailed, bottom-up method to determine the energy use or greenhouse gas emission of a specific product, including the materials and packaging, use of energy in manufacturing, transportation distances, and other factors.

The disadvantages of this approach are that a lot of the detailed data required is not available or carries significant errors. It’s also hard to decide exactly where to stop calculating.

When retailers and manufacturers are seeking to reduce their overall carbon footprint beyond industry averages, Cooler’s hybrid approach combines the best features of I-O and Lifecycle analyses. We work with them to determine the most important emissions components of a product or service using Lifecycle analysis and complete the emissions profile with I-O data. This hybrid approach leads to the best combination of accuracy and comprehensiveness available today.

More questions? Contact Customer Service.