Defining a Standardized Process for Measuring and Reporting Product’s Energy Usage Emissions : A Case Study at a Manufacturing Company

Abstract: As CO2 emissions increase, so does the average temperature, leading toenvironmental consequences such as rising sea levels, drought, and starvation.Therefore, it is essential to act towards the reduction of the CO2 emissionsto counteract these dire consequences. The Science Based Target initiative(SBTi) which is a non-governmental organization has created a framework fororganisations to set net-zero targets for 2050. The goals are accompanied byguidelines, demands and recommendations for how to measure and reportemissions across a supply chain. There are challenges and problems attached to measuring CO2 emissions formultinational companies (MNC). The emissions are divided into three scopes.Scope 3 which consists of indirect emissions coming from up- anddownstream of the focal companies has proven to be challenging to gatherdata for due to lack of proper company capabilities. This thesis aims toidentify challenges related to measuring and reporting the emissions caused bythe use of sold products, which is one of the 15 categories of Scope 3.Moreover, this study aims to create a standardized framework for MNCs byaddressing the necessary steps for collecting data for developing an emissionscalculation tool and to suggest how to properly calculate and illustrateemissions ty the focal company. Lastly, the implementability of the frameworkwill be assessed. The research methods include a case study with a set of unstructuredinterviews of nine participants. These includes engineers, innovationmanagers, sustainability managers and product managers. Moreover, aniterative process for developing a calculation tool was performed includingtesting of the tool as it was developed. The case study identified challenges of calculating emissions from soldproducts. These were of lack of IT infrastructure, insufficient data forcalculating emissions, high uncertainties of how the organization shouldconduct measuring of emissions and how to allocate resources in the SBTiimplementation. Moreover, the risks of interpreting calculated dataincorrectly were identified. Lastly, a framework was created consisting of aseven-step process including: communicating transition, assembling projectteams, covering emission, mapping data, creating the tool, task delegation andeducation and standardization.