Carbon Footprint Accounting for General Goods—A Comparison

Carbon emissions are an actual topic in the European public discussion due to the climate objectives of the European Union and the countries in specific. Especially the traffic and the transport sector have been evaluated as polluters so that logistics service providers and forwarders are getting into the focus of their customers to provide a systemic approach in calculating the carbon footprint of their logistics services. In addition customers struggle to compare carbon footprints of several logistics service providers and forwarders, due to the lack of a common standard for calculating of carbon emissions. There are two existing approaches, which are getting in focus for the logistics companies if they have not outsourced the calculation or are using fee-based calculation software. On the one hand, there is the European standard EN 16258, which has been established in Europe to create more transparency and on the other hand there is the GLEC framework as a global approach which aims to create a global standardized procedure. Both standards allow different approaches for emission calculation which lead to totally different results of carbon emission. Due to that a comparable value for customers and stakeholder is not given.