About the Carbon Trust Footprinting Company

The Carbon Label Company was set up by the Carbon Trust in 2007 to help meet the needs of both businesses and their customers. In 2009, the Company became the Carbon Trust Footprinting Company to reflect the breadth of services it now provides to meet:

• Business Needs - to measure, reduce and communicate the lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of their products and services, including food and drink.
• Consumer Needs - to help people make choices that would lower their own carbon footprints, and to educate them on how the way they use the products they buy can lower their carbon footprints.

The Carbon Trust Footprinting Certification Company was established in 2009 to provide independent and impartial certification services for product carbon footprints.

This complements the Carbon Trust's work of helping businesses to certify and communicate their corporate carbon footprints.

Creating a standard for comparability

The Carbon Trust, along with Defra, instigated BSI British Standards' development of a Publicly Available specification (the PAS 2050) for assessing GHG emissions of products and services. Developed in parallel, the Code of Good Practice on GHG emissions and reductions claims (the Code), is a guide to making claims about GHG emissions.

When working with businesses, the Carbon Trust Footprinting Company applies its own set of proprietary data to the PAS 2050 and the Code to ensure standardisation of measurements within product and service categories. It is this process that allows customers to easily compare the GHG footprints of different products, whatever their origins.