BASF Report 2021

Product Carbon Footprint

In line with increasingly ambitious climate protection targets, CO2 transparency is becoming more and more important for us and our customers. We have published a comprehensive corporate carbon footprint along our value chain every year since 2008. In addition, we already calculated carbon footprints for individual products in the past. To further increase transparency, we developed a digital solution to determine product-specific greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 and have since calculated the carbon footprints of around 45,000 sales products. These Product Carbon Footprints include all greenhouse gas emissions from raw material extraction to the finished BASF product leaving the factory gates (“cradle-to-gate”). The data helps us to target our CO2 reduction measures to those areas where our customers can later achieve the greatest value added from lower carbon emissions in the value chain.

To determine the carbon footprint of our purchased raw materials (upstream Scope 3 emissions), we have until now worked with industry averages and values from external databases. To obtain a more accurate data base and reduce emissions in the supply chain, we launched our Supplier CO2 Management Program in 2021. The aim of the program is to, in a first step, determine the carbon footprints of raw materials as accurately as possible. We support our suppliers here by sharing our knowledge of valuation and calculation methods, for example. In the second step, we then want to work with our suppliers to identify levers and targets to continuously reduce greenhouse gas emissions along the supply chain.

Value chain
A value chain describes the successive steps in a production process: from raw materials through various intermediate steps, such as transportation and production, to the finished product.