What Really Drives a Product Carbon Footprint and How Businesses Can Use It to Compete

For any business that makes, imports or sells products and wants to know where its product carbon footprint actually comes from, and what to do about it.

Why this session?

Previous cluster sessions have laid out Ireland’s carbon emissions at a national and sector level. This session goes one level deeper, to the product itself, which is what a consumer buys and what a business makes, sells and reports on. It is the actionable driver of carbon emissions.

For example, did you know a bouquet of roses carries around five times the carbon footprint of a bouquet of tulips?

What we’ll cover

From sectors to products
What are the key drivers of Ireland’s carbon emissions at a product level?

How a product carbon footprint is built
The common building blocks that apply to every product, the parts that are product specific, and how the Greenhouse Gas Protocol provides the overall measurement approach.

Real product carbon footprint examples
From horticulture (cut flowers), beverages (bottled water and spirits), textiles (fast fashion), and transportation (petrol and diesel cars, electric cars, trains), showing what really drives the carbon footprint and how often intuition gets it wrong. See how our everyday choices drive carbon emissions.

From reporting to competitive advantage
How businesses are using product footprint data to make sourcing and packaging decisions, position against competitors, and answer customer questions before they are asked.

Q&A and open discussion, with tea and coffee afterwards.

Who should attend

This session is for owners, managers and sustainability leads in any business that makes, imports, distributes or sells physical products, and for the tech and services firms that support them.

No carbon expertise is needed.

If you have ever thought product carbon footprints were something you should act on but found them too complicated, or had no idea where to start, this session is for you.

What you’ll get out of it

You will leave understanding how a product carbon footprint is calculated and what really drives it, plus a practical sense of where to look first in your own product range.

You will see how AI and pre-built product models mean a business can now start from a credible indicative footprint on day one, refining it as better data becomes available, instead of facing a long and expensive analysis before learning anything.

And you will see how footprint data is shifting from a compliance and reporting exercise into a source of competitive advantage, including the buy local story that Irish producers can increasingly prove with numbers.

Be ready for some surprising insights!

Special offer for attendees

Eamonn has very kindly offered everyone who attends the session a free Product Carbon Footprint from KnowCarbon, giving you a practical opportunity to see what your own product footprint looks like, or understand the footprint of any product you choose, and where its biggest carbon impacts come from.

About the speaker

Eamonn Galvin
Founder, KnowCarbon

Eamonn Galvin is the founder of KnowCarbon, an Irish company backed by Enterprise Ireland that measures product carbon footprints using AI.

Previously at eBay and CEO of Daft, Eamonn brings a strong commercial and practical focus to carbon measurement.

KnowCarbon’s data is used in over 20 countries by clients including Interflora. It has built footprint models across multiple sectors from horticulture to food & beverages to medical devices and presented its work at the Associated British Foods innovation conference in Cambridge.