Carbon Footprints from Enterprises to Product Instances: The Potential of the EPC Network

Abstract

A growing number of companies quantify and report the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their activities. Collecting this data on a company-level facilitates the participation in emission trading programs and underlines the corporate social responsibility activities. However, enabling individual consumers to choose products with favorable “carbon footprints” requires data on the level of individual products, or even better, on item-level, also capturing information on transportation, cooling, etc. For providing such dynamic and fine granular measurements, the relevant enterprise information systems should be adapted accordingly. We present in this paper a spectrum of greenhouse gas reporting activities of increasing granularity and propose how companies can use EPC Information Services to reach a high level of reporting granularity.