Carbon footprint assessment technology and its application in key industries

As our country’s carbon footprint research is started late, the establishment of a thorough carbon footprint assessment system is an inevitable choice for us to effectively cope with complex international relations and increasingly fierce international low-carbon economic competition, scientifically promote and guide the development of green and low-carbon transformation, and orderly achieve the “double carbon” goal. Based on domestic and foreign literature research, the carbon footprint concept, carbon footprint assessment methods, carbon footprint assessment standards, carbon footprint assessment boundary division and data acquisition were reviewed and analyzed systematically. Although the academic definition of carbon footprint was not yet completely unified, more people tended to elaborate it from the perspective of the whole life cycle. In this paper, the concept of carbon footprint of industrial products was supplemented and improved from the perspectives of the “whole life cycle” and “whole process”. Compared with the input-output analysis method (IOA), the life cycle assessment method (LCA) was relatively leading in development, had certain advantages in universality, systematization and quantification, and expanded the product system in time and space, but it still needed to be further improved in the terms of the truncation error control, data quality assurance and unification of standard system, etc. PAS2050, GHG Protocol and ISO14067 were currently the most widely used whole life cycle carbon footprint assessment standards. However, more detailed, precise and clear Product Category Rules (PCR) were needed for specific product categories. Based on the above research summary and the analysis of the application progress of carbon footprint assessment technology in key industrial emission control industry such as electric power, steel, cement, petroleum and chemical industry, the problems existing in the current research and the challenges facing the development of our country's carbon footprint assessment technology were proposed: ①The localization carbon emission database of the whole life cycle and whole process of multiple fields had yet to be improved; ② A high-precision, standardized and internationally recognized carbon footprint assessment methodology had yet to be built; and ③ The research on the combination of carbon footprint and quantitative assessment of carbon emission reduction was not in-depth enough, and there were few landmark demonstration projects that supported the implementation of carbon footprints for low-carbon solutions. In the future, it was necessary to further explore the combination of carbon footprint assessment technology with carbon emissions accounting and carbon trading research, combine product carbon footprint with product carbon labeling and Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), and give full play to the role of carbon footprint assessment technology in promoting scientific and orderly carbon reduction, guiding green and low-carbon consumption, and responding to trade barriers, etc. This paper could provide a reference for promoting the establishment of a comprehensive, scientific, accurate and standardized carbon footprint assessment system in China. © 2023 Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.