How do we convert spend on a product into a CO2 equivalent?

Question

Hi,

We are trying to help a client with their CO2 convertions and are finding that for quite a lot of the stuff they buy there are no activites measures e.g. grams, kilometres etc. so we have to use a "EURO to CO2 convertion".

But we have no clue as to how we do that... can someone guide us? The client is using Exiobase and Ecoinvent for the rest of the their action based convertions. So we can use any of the two - but we have never worked on this before....

Any initial guidance will be highly appreciated!

Answer 1

Hi, interesting, but I think there is not one trustworthy factor to convert Euro spent to CO2 eq (you can buy electricity from coal power, from photovoltaic, or a painting - this will lead to very different "conversion" factors CO2eq/Euro for each product).

Maybe better would be to use exiobase's and ecoinvent's impact method and calculate the GWP for these database. You will need to merge the impact categories for both databases in one method since the two databases are not aligned, but this is probably anyhow good to keep separate. You will thus have a new method with two impact categories, GWP ecoinvent and GWP exiobase (or also more detailed other climate impact categories if you want).

Good luck!

Andreas

Comments

Hi, Thank you for your reply. We are also very interested in such database especially for Scope 3. We have only total spend for the products and services, Therefore we need to use a factor for our industry to multiply it with total Euro spent as stated in GHG Protocol (spend-based method). Could you please suggest which database we can use in this case?