Organisational footprint

This looks at the activities of your organisation - whether it's a company, school or a household - and calculates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to those activities.

There are usually six main gases taken into account in the calculations, known as 'the Kyoto six'. To simplify calculations, the global warming potential (GWP) of 1 tonne of carbon dioxide over 100 years is taken as 1 unit and other gases, which have greater GWPs, multiplied accordingly. The final footprint is therefore a carbon dioxide equivalent, known as CO2e or CO2eq. If a footprint is calculated based just on CO2 emissions, it should  be referred to as tCO2 (tonnes of CO2).

How do you decide what to include?

Deciding what to include is referred to as 'setting boundaries' and 'defining scope', and there are various guidelines. What you choose depends a lot on why you are measuring your footprint.

For a footprint report for the CRC Energy Efficiency scheme, due to start in the UK in April, you need to follow the specific guidelines set out in the Environment Agency guidance documents.

Otherwise, there are two main sets of guidelines to follow, particularly if you want to report on your footprint - the GHG Protocol (which is international) and, in the UK, the Defra GHG Reporting Guidelines, which are based on this.  They use a system of three 'scopes' for emissions to include, as does the Carbon Trust Standard. For readers from outside the UK, there are links on the right to other government websites with information and guidelines.

There is also the Carbon Disclosure Project, for which specific information requests are sent out. This was launched in 2000 "to collect and distribute high quality information that motivates investors, corporations and governments to take action to prevent dangerous climate change." Those involved include large multi-national corporations and public sector bodies, who are not just reporting their own emissions but also collecting information about their supply chains. It is therefore a project that may involve printers.

Product footprint

A product footprint looks at all the emissions involved over the lifecycle of a product.

A full footprint will include the GHG emissions from harvesting or mining raw materials, product manufacture, product use (as for many products, that is where their emissions are greatest) and end of life. Wastes generated at all the various stages are taken into account, as well as transport and storage - again, for some products, such as foods that need chilling or freezing, storage can play an important part.

There are different boundaries for this too, and most printers are likely to be concerned with the business-to-business footprint. For this, you would calculate only up until you have delivered to your customers or the mailing house or distribution centre. If your customer wants to complete the footprint, it is then their role to measure distribution, use and end of life.