Methodology for Production Carbon Footprint Calculations : A Case of Cylindrical Pins Manufacturing

Abstract: Reduction of emissions and utilization of energy are topics that have been widely discussed in the recent past. In order to align with the aim of several manufacturing companies to reduce their emissions, the development of a carbon footprint quantification tool is very desirable. Such a tool can be instrumental in identifying and evaluating areas of improvement within their entire supply chain. This thesis attempts to create a tool to calculate the product carbon footprint in a manufacturing environment, by taking up a case at a company that manufactures cylindrical pins at Järna, Sweden. This thesis project attempts to break down the processes involved in the manufacturing process and decipher the individual contributions each process makes to the product carbon footprint. Such a tool, used to quantify the greenhouse gases consumed or emitted by a product over a particular period of time would require a collaborative effort from the management at the company and their suppliers to retrieve all the requisite data from the processes. Furthermore, in order to ensure a holistic ecological assessment of a product catalogue, a comprehensive study of all primary and secondary activities in the facility was conducted. In addition to creating the carbon footprint calculator, a key aspect of this project was to investigate the different public declarations of carbon footprint and the methodologies of calculating the emissions in similar environments. The tool curated using the aforementioned data is used to calculate the product carbon footprint of some products manufactured at the facility to eventually identify methods of improving the ecological performance of the company while understanding the salient features a carbon footprint calculator must have in order to operate efficiently in other facilities with similar operational capacities.