Carbon Calculations over the Life Cycle of Industrial Activities (CCaLC)

Abstract

The CCaLC project is a ‘Carbon Vision Project Industry’ funded by the Carbon Trust, the NERC and the EPSRC. It is a multi faceted project that involves developing; life cycle methodologies; a data acquisition methodology; case studies of different industrial sectors; and a modelling framework and software tool. This paper focuses on the CCaLC software tool that has been developed during the past year and is currently being developed with feedback from industrial partners. The aim of the software is to allow a wide range of industrial users to quickly, easily and cheaply estimate the carbon footprint for their products and services. A description of the current state of the tool is presented in this paper including the methodology, the aims, the structure and the various features it contains. The main feature of the tool is that it calculates the carbon inventory at each stage of the life-cycle of a product or process. It is intended that it will also allow for the calculation of economic value added at every stage so that environmental and economic impacts can be balanced. The development of this tool is a significant advancement in the field of commercial carbon footprint calculation.