Brenntag, the global leader in chemical distribution, partnered with Carbon Minds to create a Product Carbon Footprint service for customers, develop a PCF methodology and get it third-party certified.

In this interview, we sit down with Andreas Kicherer to delve into the project and offer first-hand insights to others who are also working on a PCF methodology.

Andreas Kicherer 
Vice President Sustainability, Brenntag

When you started this project, what was your goal? What were you trying to achieve?

More and more customers and business partners are requesting transparent information about the environmental impact and especially the climate impact, of Brenntag’s products. We wanted to establish a guideline that would allow us to provide customers and partners with transparent, credible, and comparable PCFs.

Was it easy to get this done? What barriers did you face?

Although we had detailed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) knowledge at management level, the expertise of our LCA practitioner was in the development stage. We also didn’t have  experience with TÜV’s newly established methodology for the certification process.

How did you overcome those barriers?

Mainly two things. A valuable learning opportunity came from the collaboration with other TfS members in the workstream dedicated to the PCF project. Furthermore, Carbon Minds supported us with the creation of the methodology document, carried out an in-house training session on LCA, provided us with life cycle data and helped us navigate the TÜV certification process. Both of these external sources of support, TfS and Carbon Minds, were very important in filling our experience and knowledge gaps. This resulted in our internal experts learning a lot very quickly.

Sustainability is a complex and diverse topic and there is an increasing demand from customers and business partners for transparent information on environmental impacts.

Andreas Kicherer 
Vice President Sustainability, Brenntag

How did establishing a PCF methodology work for you exactly?

To be able to provide comparable and transparent PCFs, a robust methodology is needed. Therefore, we created a methodology document to provide a technical guide for calculating the PCF of our products. The methodology needs to comply with ISO 14067:2018 and the Together for Sustainability  (TfS) Guideline for PCF Calculations (v2.0). We also planned to get our methodology certified by TÜV.

What did you manage to achieve in the end?

In the end we managed to achieve a very significant step forward in making PCFs available to our partners and customers. With our PCF tool CO2Xplorer, we have been providing PCFs since 2022. Since last year, the methodology has been certified by TÜV Rheinland Energy GmbH, confirming our methodology to be compliant with ISO 14067:2018 and the TfS Guideline. We’re the first global chemical distribution company to do this for a semi-automated PCF tool. The certification and consistency of the methodology underline the credibility of our PCFs and allow our partners to identify potential emissions reductions.

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