Product Carbon Footprint: Life-Cycle Stages, Emission Factors, Hotspots & Eco-Design

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn three kettles with different lifetimes and efficiencies into the same functional unit (ten years of boiled water for one household) and find out which one really has the lowest footprint.
• Turn the Aurel's bill of materials into purchased material (including production scrap), look up an emission factor for every material and find the materials footprint and the share of the steel body.
• Turn a year of plant electricity and gas into kg CO2e, share it between three products by machine hours and by mass, and see how much the allocation key moves the kettle's footprint.
• Calculate the tonne-kilometres of each transport leg from factory to shop, apply mode factors with a lookup, add up the distribution footprint per kettle and test what one rush shipment by air would do.
• Calculate the kettle's electricity per year, let the grid factor fall year by year, sum the use-phase footprint over the six-year life and value what users would save by boiling only the water they need.
• Split every material into recycled, incinerated and landfilled shares, calculate the end-of-life emissions with the cut-off approach and report the recycling credit separately as a net figure.
• Sum a line-item inventory into five life-cycle stages, calculate the share of each stage, chart the stages and highlight every stage above 10% of the footprint: the hotspots where redesign pays off.
• Put the Aurel and the redesigned Aurel Eco on the same functional unit, calculate the change per stage and in total, and decide whether the redesign meets Kettlewick's 30% reduction target.