General Product Carbon Footprint manual

Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) management in ChainTraced collects the emissions of what you buy, adds the emissions of what you do, and gives your customers the result per product. This page is the overview of that flow; the pages linked from each section go into detail.

Part of the footprint	Comes from	Lands on
Upstream emissions, the products you buy	PCFs your suppliers report, their published datasets, or datasets you create with secondary data	The purchased product, and through the bill of material every product it goes into
Process emissions, your own operations	An emission dataset you create and attach	The manufactured product
The product's PCF	Both of the above, aggregated through the bill of material	The Emission data tab of the product, and the PCF transactions you submit to customers

Where: products and their suppliers under Registry > Products; PCF requests you send under Product Transactions > Supplier; PCF requests from your customers under Product Transactions > Customer; datasets under Standards > Emission Datasets; categories for secondary data under Standards > Emission Categories.

1. Upstream emissions for purchased products

Before anything else, the purchased product must exist with the type Purchased and, if you will ask suppliers, at least one supplier under Product suppliers; see Create Products and Counterparty Management. Then choose the route that fits each product.

Route	When	How
Ask the supplier	The supplier is on ChainTraced, or you want them to report through ChainTraced.	Open the product, tick the suppliers under Product suppliers and click Request PCF. A product transaction of the type Environmental Declaration is created per supplier and appears under Product Transactions > Supplier. Details in Collect upstream emissions from supplier with Request.
Take the supplier's published data	The supplier has made a dataset public.	See Fetch emission data from suppliers.
Enter it yourself	You have the figures, or you estimate with secondary data.	Create a dataset and attach it to the purchased product, or give the product an Emission Category backed by a category dataset. See Add upstream emissions with Dataset and Estimate emissions with secondary data.

Supplier PCF on the product

With the PCF module, the Product suppliers table on the Product data tab has a Supplier PCF column. It shows per supplier where the emissions in use come from, and under it the expiry date of that PCF, in red once it has passed.

Supplier PCF	Meaning
Approved	The supplier's PCF is approved and in use. Click it to open the transaction.
PCF requested	A request to the supplier is open; hover to see its status and since when. Until it is approved the emissions in use are the previous ones, and Secondary data in use under the chip means they come from a category dataset.
Secondary data	The supplier has not provided a PCF, so the dataset of the product's Emission Category is used. Click it to open the dataset.
None	The supplier has no PCF and there is no category dataset to fall back on.

To request, tick the suppliers and click Request PCF. A supplier with an open request is skipped, and when a selected supplier already has an approved PCF that has not expired, ChainTraced asks whether to request a new one. The same column appears in the Supplier PCFs table on the Emission data tab, together with each supplier's Contribution to the product's emissions; see Transport emissions.

Review a supplier's PCF

Under Product Transactions > Supplier, open the transaction in Needs your approval .
Check the Product Carbon Footprint section: the emissions per unit, primary data share and, where the supplier filled in the calculator, the breakdown.
Click Approve or Approve with comment. Request Changes sends it back to the supplier with your remarks; Reject closes it.

On approval the reported emissions are assigned to the purchased product and, through the bill of material, to every product it is part of. Nothing else needs to be done on those products.

Status	Meaning
Requested	Sent to the supplier, not yet answered.
Needs your approval	The supplier has submitted emission data for you to review.
Requested changes	You sent it back; the supplier is revising.
Approved	Accepted; the emissions are in use on your products.
Rejected	Declined by you.
Withdrawn	Taken back by whoever created it.

2. Your own emissions: datasets

An emission dataset describes emissions for a period: a plant's average, a product family, a manufacturing route. It can hold just a total with a primary data share, or the full calculation with every source. Datasets are attached to products, and when a new version of a dataset is published every product using it is updated.

Where: Standards > Emission Datasets, Create new Dataset.

Select a Dataset type: Process for your own operations, Category for secondary data that applies to every purchased product in an emission category, Transport for a transport route.
Enter the Title and click Create draft. It stays a draft, invisible to products, until you publish it from the dataset page. Create & publish publishes at once.
Fill in the dataset details and the emissions, as described below.
Save draft as you go. When the data is complete, Review & publish shows what changes and Publish makes it the version products use. Discard & back drops an unsaved draft.

Field	What to enter
Reporting period, Expiry date	The time the data represents, and when it must be renewed. Products using an expired dataset are flagged.
Location	Where the data was measured, or the area secondary data is valid for.
Standard used	Pick from the list or type your own.
Process boundary description	System boundaries and cut-off rules in your own words.
Third party verification	Tick when the data is verified; name the verifier in the description.
Primary data share, Is secondary data, Secondary emission source	How much of the data is measured rather than taken from a database, and where the database data comes from.

Emissions can be entered in two ways. In simple mode you type the total and the primary data share. Switch to advanced mode opens the Calculator: choose a Calculation template (Default for totals per group, Component Manufacturer for consumption and emission factors per source, Steel Maker for the cradle-to-crude-steel and crude-steel-to-gate split), then per group either Add Emissions for a total or Calculate Emissions for an Amount, Emission Factor and its source. Switching modes discards what was entered in the other.

Dataset action	What it does
Duplicate	Starts a new dataset from this one, for the next period or a variant.
Pull latest version	On a dataset imported from a supplier: takes their newest published version.
Delete	Removes the dataset permanently from ChainTraced.

Attach a dataset to a manufactured product

Open the product and go to the Emission data tab, sub-tab Link emissions.
Under Process Emission Dataset, click Pick a dataset to add and choose the dataset. One process dataset per product.
Save the product. Emissions overview now shows the total per unit, the split between the bill of material and your process, and the PCF Status: Complete , or Needs data with the reason, for example a component without a PCF or a missing process dataset.

The Manual emissions sub-tab is the alternative for a product whose figure you simply know: type the emissions and primary data share there instead of linking anything.

Many products at once: in Registry > Products, filter (for example Product Type: Manufactured), tick the rows or the header checkbox for the whole filtered set, then Edit > Assign dataset, pick the dataset and click Assign dataset to products. Emission data already on those products is overwritten. The Attached Datasets column, enabled with Columns, shows the result.

3. Report the PCF to a customer

A customer's PCF request arrives as a product transaction under Product Transactions > Customer.

Open the request. If no product of yours is linked, pick it under Product; the customer's product number is shown next to it. See Link product numbers from the transaction list for linking many at once.
Check the Product Carbon Footprint section. It always shows the product's current PCF: changes on the product or its datasets are carried over to open PCF transactions automatically.
Add attachments if the customer expects a report, then Submit. To submit many at once, tick them in the list and choose Edit > Submit.

The customer approves it as described above. Their questions come back as Requested changes; answer them on the transaction and submit again. General handling of product transactions is in Product Transactions.