International standards for product evaluation and carbon footprint

Plan December 2012 officially released the standard. Due to the lack of a clear description of the quantitative method of product usage, the carbon footprint of the product life cycle is not strong enough. In October 2009, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) decided to set up a special working group on greenhouse gases (TC111) (TC111), the chairman of the Committee on environmental standardization for electrical and electronic products and systems.

The international standard product carbon footprint assessment (ISO and IEC) the international organization for standardization ISO is actively developing carbon footprint standard ISO14067, its content structure with PAS2050 as the main reference, in 2009 completed the first draft (CD1):ISO14067-1 (CD1) "carbon footprint" quantitative products and ISO14067-2 (CD1) communication: "carbon footprint" products.

At the January 2011 meeting in Italy, decided to merge the two standards, the formation of ISO14067 (CD2) second draft, the main contents include: scope, normative documents, terms and definitions, principles, methodology, quantitative information exchange, report form.

Due to the lack of a clear description of the quantitative method of product usage, the carbon footprint of the product life cycle is not strong enough.

In October 2009, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) decided to set up a special working group on greenhouse gases (TC111) (TC111), the chairman of the Committee on environmental standardization for electrical and electronic products and systems.

In October 2010 2 decided to carry out the research of electrical and electronic products carbon footprint standard: "electrical and electronic products and the system of greenhouse gas emissions --" quantitative method of "electrical and electronic products and systems products of carbon label example quantitative method of" greenhouse gas emission reduction project baseline world problems in global warming under pressure on countries have developed a carbon footprint evaluation method and carbon label system, in order to encourage and promote low-carbon products production and consumption.

But there are still some problems:

(1) there is no unified methodology, all countries have a different methodology, or even a country different institutions have different methodological differences, mainly in: product system borders, data quality, distribution principle, simplicity principle, use stage and abandonment stage of data processing, information reporting emissions etc.. As a result of the use of different methodologies, the product carbon footprint results are different, or there is no comparable, so it is not conducive to the circulation of products in the world.

In addition, the assumptions adopted by different methodologies may not make the carbon footprint comparable. In the evaluation of the use of the real assumptions, optimistic or ideal scene, will bring different evaluation results. In order to make the results of carbon footprint comparable, such assumptions should be clearly defined.

(2) lack of life cycle data.

Although many countries or organizations have established some basic database of life cycle, but many data product specific real life cycle can not get, so in the actual process of evaluation, evaluation of enterprise personnel using a variety of ways such as compromise with similar technology, access to some data instead of literature data, estimation the data or even directly ignored, this has seriously affected the accuracy of carbon footprint assessment, or even make a evaluation can not be carried out due to lack of data.