Supply Chain

Hidden Emissions Hotspots:
The Ones You'd Never Guess

Brand Provided | By Weichang Yuan, Ph.D. and Planet FWD | Published 49 minutes ago | About a 5 minute read

Image: Baspherical

When companies picture their product carbon footprint, they picture the obvious things: energy, transportation, the big-volume ingredients. Those matter. But some of the most significant findings in our work come from inputs nobody flags, small by volume, invisible on a spend report, yet large by climate impact.

Two methods surface these findings, and they answer different questions. A life cycle assessment measures one product across its full value chain, from raw material to end of life. A corporate greenhouse gas inventory measures one organization over one reporting year, sorted into Scopes 1, 2, and 3. The examples below come from both. Each one carries the same lesson: you can't guess your footprint. You have to measure at the level of the actual physical input, and trace that input to its source.

Dry ice: the hotspot that wasn't

A client’s LCA had what looked like an obvious hotspot. The product is shipped frozen, packed in dry ice, and dry ice sublimates into CO2. So the first-pass model counted the full mass of the dry ice as CO2 emissions at end of life.

Then we investigated further. Dry ice is made from captured industrial CO2. When it sublimates, is it introducing new fossil emissions, or releasing CO2 that was already captured upstream? And where did that CO2 originate?

We traced the supply chain: the dry ice came from the biological processing of feedstock in a bio-diesel refinery, which makes the CO2 biogenic rather than fossil. Both the GHG Protocol Product Standard and ISO 14067 require biogenic CO2 to be reported separately from fossil CO2, so the dry ice end-of-life emissions moved out of the fossil total and into a separate biogenic line.

The number went from a meaningful line item to zero in the fossil CO2 emission bucket. The same physical input, dry ice, can be a real emission or no emission at all, depending entirely on where the CO2 came from. You can't know which without tracing it, and guessing either overstates your footprint by counting biogenic CO2 as fossil, or understates it the other way, but neither one survives real scrutiny.

Whipped cream: small input, outsized impact

For a coffee chain, Scope 3 dominates the total footprint. Dairy, coffee, and packaging carry most of the impact, and that isn't news to anyone in the sector. Scope 1 is smaller and often gets less scrutiny. That's where an inventory can surprise you.

Ask someone to name the biggest driver there and they'll guess the espresso machines, the ovens, maybe the delivery fleet. In a recent corporate inventory for a multi-location beverage retailer, one of the largest was whipped cream.

The cream itself falls under Scope 3 emissions, while the propellant is Scope 1, a direct emission. Whipped cream dispensers use nitrous oxide (N2O), which has a global warming potential roughly 273 times that of CO2 over 100 years (IPCC AR6). You don't buy much of it. But in this inventory, N2O from whipped cream dispensers came in above 5% of total emissions, even under a conservative estimate of how much gas is in each canister.

This is a case where a low-volume input by weight can become a meaningful contributor by carbon impact, and is the kind of finding that spend-based or category-level GHG accounting misses. A propellant is cheap and low-volume, so it disappears in a top-down estimate. It only surfaces when you measure at the activity level, where a high-GWP input gets counted for its actual impact.

There's no commercial propellant alternative on the market today, so the only way to fully remove the impact is making whipped cream in-house, mechanically. Short of that, the first step is measuring how much N2O is actually in your canisters, since even this estimate had to be modeled rather than measured directly.

Refrigerants: the leak you don't see

Refrigeration is easy to account for as an energy cost, the electricity to run the compressors. The bigger climate issue is often the refrigerant itself.

Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants have global warming potentials in the thousands. Common ones used in commercial refrigeration carry GWPs ranging from roughly 1,800 to nearly 4,000 times CO2. To put that in perspective, regulators have noted that a single small canister of one common refrigerant is roughly as potent as a year's worth of fuel for eight cars. The catch is that refrigerant emissions come from leakage, not consumption. Equipment leaks slowly over its life and during servicing and disposal, and that leaked gas goes straight into the atmosphere at full GWP. A business can track its electricity precisely and still miss the larger refrigerant impact entirely, because nobody is metering the leak.

Depending on what your business model is, this might contribute more or less to your overall inventory. But in the case of a grocery retailer with hundreds of locations and refrigeration in all of them, it might end up contributing to over 70% of Scope 1 emissions or be 3-5% of the entire Scope 1, 2, and 3 inventory. Doing maintenance and leak management or switching to natural refrigerants can therefore have a very meaningful impact on overall emissions.

For any business with significant cold chain, refrigeration, or cold storage, whether that's grocery, food service, dairy, or logistics, this is worth measuring directly rather than assuming the energy figure captures it.

The pattern across all three

Three very different inputs, one lesson. The emissions that matter most to your footprint are often not the ones that cost the most or weigh the most. A trace-volume propellant, a slow refrigerant leak, a block of dry ice whose impact depends entirely on its source, none of these show up in a top-down, spend-based estimate.

They surface when you do two things: measure at the activity or ingredient level, so high-impact inputs get counted for their actual effect, and trace each input to its source, so you know whether an emission is fossil or biogenic, captured or new. That's the difference between a number you hope is right and one that holds up when an auditor, a regulator, or a customer asks how you got it.

Planet FWD builds ingredient-level life cycle assessments and corporate GHG inventories that surface findings like these and hold up under third-party review. If you want to know what's hiding in your footprint, talk to our team.