State of Sustainability Podcast

Guest: Amber, Sustainability Research Lead, Altruistiq

SAIF: Welcome back to another episode of the State of Sustainability. I'm your host Saif Hamid, founder and CEO of Altruistiq.

We recently did an episode on PCFs — product carbon footprints — at what I would call the 10,000-foot level. To go deeper, I wanted to bring on someone who is considered a genuine expert on this topic within our business. I am joined by Amber, our Sustainability Research Lead. Amber, could you start by telling everyone a little about what your day-to-day looks like at Altruistiq?

AMBER: Officially, I am sustainability research lead. My days are filled with thinking about best practice and standards — how we align what we are doing on the platform with where the methodologies are — while always asking: what is the end use? Why are we doing this? How do we make the numbers and calculations actually useful for the people trying to work with them?

SAIF: Let's start with the basics. What is a PCF and why does it matter?

AMBER: A PCF — product carbon footprint — is a calculation of all the carbon emissions that have gone into making a product. You can do cradle-to-gate, which covers everything up to the point the product leaves the factory, or cradle-to-grave, which also includes the emissions from using and disposing of the product.

Take a chocolate bar as an example. Cradle-to-gate would cover everything from growing the cocoa beans and running the dairy farm to making the chocolate, packaging it, and shipping it to the supermarket. If you go all the way to the grave, you are also accounting for me driving to the shop to buy it — or hopefully cycling — and then disposing of the packaging at the end.

SAIF: I want to explore two angles on where PCFs are useful: consumer communication, and supplier engagement. Starting with consumer communication — is a PCF essentially a label? Or is there more to it?

AMBER: When you are thinking about a label, you want something super simple. Standing in a supermarket, you see one number and hopefully understand what it means. A PCF typically has a lot more information around it than just that number — how it was calculated, what boundaries were used, what allocation method was applied. All of that context tends to get lost when you reduce it to a single label. The number alone — say, 5 kg of carbon for this chocolate bar — might be enough if you are comparing two products side by side and one is five and the other is seven. But that accompanying methodological context is critical, especially in a supplier engagement context.

SAIF: What about the digital product passport direction we are seeing in Europe? Food and beverage is not in scope for the current regulation, but could you imagine a world where scanning a barcode on a chocolate bar pulls up all that deeper information?

AMBER: I would love to see that, and I hope it is where we are heading. There is education work to do first — you need people to bother scanning it, and then to actually understand what they are looking at. But it is absolutely the right direction.

SAIF: One thing I have observed working with companies of different sizes is that large Fortune 500 businesses tend to use PCFs primarily for internal analysis — R&D, scenario modelling, net zero planning — rather than consumer-facing communication. Whereas smaller, direct-to-consumer brands and B Corps are much more interested in using PCFs externally. Do you see the same pattern, and why do you think it is?

AMBER: Yes, I think you are right, and it comes down to how these brands differentiate themselves in the market. For a small brand, sustainability credentials can be a core part of the brand identity — the people buying the product are actively looking for that, and seeing it reinforces their choice. For a large brand, many consumers are buying on autopilot. The risk-reward calculation for communicating environmental credentials externally looks very different, and the downside risk of getting it wrong is much higher.

SAIF: I remember when Allbirds was a shoe company — they had this physical display in a department store showing the carbon footprint of a standard pair of shoes versus a pair of Allbirds represented as a large black ball. I found it compelling, but I think it worked partly because the contrast was dramatic. If you are looking at two chocolate bars and one has a footprint of five and the other six, I do not think that delta moves anyone.

AMBER: Exactly, and that links back to the education point. A number without context does not help anyone make a better decision. You need either a relatable analogy — this is equivalent to driving 100 kilometres — or a direct comparison to something else. The comparison is probably more powerful if you are trying to actually change a purchasing decision.

SAIF: Moving to the supplier side. When a company like McDonald's is requesting PCFs from suppliers, is a supplier PCF a direct replacement for a secondary emissions factor? Or is it more complicated than that?

AMBER: This is one of the central questions in the PCF world right now. The honest answer is that it is more complicated, because a supplier PCF and a secondary emissions factor are often not directly comparable — they may have been calculated using different methodologies, different boundaries, different allocation methods, all of which can be technically valid but produce different numbers.

On boundaries, for example: one PCF might include the transportation leg from the farm to the processing location; another might not. Neither is wrong — they just have different scope. On allocation, if I put in 100 kg of ingredients and produce 50 kg of products, I could allocate emissions evenly by mass. Or, for something like meat processing, where chicken breast is worth significantly more than livers, I might allocate by economic value, which pushes more emissions to the higher-value product. Both approaches are legitimate, but they are not comparable.

SAIF: Given that complexity, where would you advise a large company to focus effort: getting supplier-specific PCFs, or investing in better secondary emissions factors?

AMBER: The key advantage of supplier PCFs is that they are the best way to demonstrate the impact of actual decarbonisation efforts. If you agree with a supplier that they are going to install solar panels and their Scope 2 electricity emissions drop to zero, no secondary emissions factor in any database is going to reflect that — you would need a specific emissions factor for chocolate made from renewable electricity at that particular factory, which simply does not exist. But if you go back to that supplier annually and ask for an updated PCF, you see the reduction, and you can reflect it in your own footprint.

That said, there is a useful middle ground, which is what you might call hybrid or spliced emissions factors. If you take a secondary factor and know that it is composed of, say, three kilograms from the farm, two from land use change, and five from the factory of which three comes from electricity, you can zero out the electricity component if you know the supplier has switched to renewables. You are still using a secondary base, but you are updating one informed component. That can be a lower-effort but still meaningful way to reflect supplier-specific decarbonisation.

SAIF: Would you call the output of that splicing exercise a PCF?

AMBER: Yes, I think I would. It has been adapted enough to be specific to the product in question. And in fact, I have spoken to PACT recently about exactly this kind of hybrid approach — it is something they are looking to accommodate within the methodology. As long as you can demonstrate that the numbers you have swapped in come from a credible source and are traceable, particularly for things like land management emissions, I think that could be PACT conformant.

SAIF: Speaking of PACT — it has become somewhat synonymous with PCFs in my world. How do you think about PACT versus the various industry extensions like TFRS and PEFCR? I have described these as the general-purpose methodology with industry-specific layers on top. Is that broadly right?

AMBER: I think there are two variants of what those extensions do. Some add additional data fields that help with understanding the emissions in a particular industry context, without changing the fundamental calculation methodology. Others introduce genuinely different accounting mechanisms. The former is valuable and helpful. The latter risks fragmentation, which is the opposite of what standardisation is trying to achieve.

The additional fields version makes a lot of sense. In manufacturing, it might be capturing kilowatt-hours of electricity separately, because that is the most actionable decarbonisation lever. In agriculture, it might be capturing fertiliser use or land use change data, because those are the dominant emission sources. In mining, it would be something else again. The point is: in this industry, this input is particularly important, so we need more granularity here.

SAIF: Michael Kobori, former Chief Sustainability Officer at Starbucks, raised the observation that PCFs right now focus on carbon, but as water, biodiversity, and other metrics become more regulated and more strategic, you might want to use the same PCF infrastructure to cover those as well. Do you think that is technically possible?

AMBER: A colleague of mine put it well recently: carbon is effectively like a currency. When you are measuring a product carbon footprint, it is not really because carbon is the only thing that matters — it is because carbon is a good proxy for overall environmental impact. I think that is true to an extent, but focusing only on carbon does carry real risk of missing other significant impacts. You might switch to a lower-carbon supplier, but that supplier operates in a water-scarce region and the water impact of your product is actually far larger there.

There is definitely space for beyond-carbon reporting. If you look at a traditional life cycle assessment database like EcoInvent, you have literally hundreds of columns of different environmental impact categories. The challenge is identifying which of those are useful and actionable, and avoiding collecting data purely for the sake of collecting it.

SAIF: There is a certain irony in the carbon-as-currency framing. Of all environmental impacts, water is probably the one that is most literally monetised in real life — it is traded, priced, and in some jurisdictions increasingly securitised. And the scarcity trajectory for water is probably steeper and more near-term than for carbon.

AMBER: Absolutely. And that is probably going to get more pronounced, not less.

SAIF: Final question: flash forward three years. What is the one big thing that has changed about how PCFs are gathered, created, used, or assured?

AMBER: For me it would be much greater clarity before PCFs are collected about what they are going to be used for — and potentially different types of PCF collection for different use cases.

Right now, we are so early in the PCF world that getting a PCF at all feels like the first milestone. You get it done and then figure out what to do with it. But we are already starting to see different parts of businesses want PCFs for different purposes. R&D wants to understand what happens if they switch one ingredient for another. The sustainability reporting team wants to track whether the company is decarbonising on the right trajectory. Those are different questions that might require different types of data collection. In three years, I think defining the use case first and building the PCF request around it will become the norm rather than the exception.

SAIF: Amber, thank you so much. We covered the fundamentals of what a PCF is, how it can work as a consumer communication tool, how it fits into supplier engagement strategy and compares to secondary emissions factors, PACT and its extensions, the carbon-versus-water question, and your three-year prediction. Really enjoyed having you on the show.

For listeners with questions for me or for Amber, drop me a note at saif@altruistiq.com and I will make sure it gets to the right person.

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