Category Archives: Life Cycle Assessment

What is Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly?

What is Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly?

Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly is an initiative launched by Amazon to assist customers in finding and purchasing more sustainable products. Here’s a breakdown of the program:

  • Product identification: It highlights products that have achieved a certain level of sustainability through certifications.
  • Certification bodies: It involves collaboration with trusted third-party certifiers and also uses Amazon’s own certifications.
  • Focus areas: The program emphasizes various aspects of sustainability, including reduced life cycle impact, recycled content and eco-friendly packaging.
  • Product variety: Climate Pledge Friendly encompasses a wide range of products across various categories like household goods, fashion, electronics, and more.
This is a green oblong badge with the words climate pledge friendly in white to the right of the green oblong is a sand timer or egg timer with angelic style wings coming out of the side

Climate Pledge Friendly Logo

Overall, this program aims to:

  • Raise customer awareness: It educates consumers about sustainable choices available on the platform.
  • Facilitate eco-conscious shopping: The Climate Pledge Friendly badge helps customers easily identify products with sustainability certifications.
  • Promote eco-friendly practices: It encourages manufacturers to adopt sustainable practices in their products and processes.

How Do I Get the Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly Badge?

Earning the Climate Pledge Friendly badge on your Amazon product involves demonstrating its sustainability credentials. Here’s how you can approach it:

Eligibility Criteria:

  • Certification: Your product needs to meet specific sustainability standards established by independent bodies or Amazon’s own criteria.
  • Category Benchmarks: Amazon evaluates product efficiency within a particular category. Products exceeding the designated unit efficiency thresholds (e.g., reduced packaging size) for their category can qualify.

Steps to Acquire the Badge:

  1. Life Cycle: For a carbon neutral product you will need to work out how much carbon is in the product.
  2. Offset: Offset is purchased to cover the amount of carbon to offset.
  3. Certification: Obtain relevant sustainability certifications from independent organizations.

  4. Amazon’s Sustainability Standards: Alternatively, your product might meet Amazon’s internal sustainability standards for specific categories like “Compact by Design.”

  5. Seller Central Application: Through Seller Central, navigate to “Products, Listings, or Inventory” and select “Climate Pledge Friendly.” Provide essential details about your product, including any certifications, and submit the application.

Additional Resources:

Benefits the Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly Badge?

  • Fulfilling the program’s requirements can enhance your product’s visibility and potentially attract eco-conscious customers.
  • Continuously improving your product’s sustainability aspects can strengthen your eligibility for the badge in the long run.

Good Products & Bad Products Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly Badge?

We have carried out life cycle assessment for many products on Amazon. From a feasibility point of view (from the sellers perspective) some work better than others.

Case Study 1 (Bad) – Yoga Matt

A yoga matt is a bulky item, that is made from plastic (polymers). Plastic has a relatively high carbon footprint (1 kg of plastic might emit 8kg of CO2e) so the problem with putting a Climate Pledge Friendly Badge on a yoga matt is that it may push the cost of the yoga matt quite high, and people will stop buying it.

A 0.5kg yoga matt will require around 4kg of carbon offsets, and as such the price might increase from say £10 to £11, this might make all the difference in a competitive volume based market.

Case Study 2 (Good) – Chopping Board

A wooden chopping board or butcher block would likely work out quite well. A 1kg wooden chopping board may emit only 0.5 kg of carbon per unit, and is sold for £12. To carbon offset would cost about £0.05 (5 pence) and as such the price barely changes.

Case Study 3 (Good) – Watch

An expensive watch may cost £100, and have arelaticly low carbon footprint, therefore any costs associated with offsets, would be proportionately small, and unlikely to impact on the sale price.

Environmental Product Declaration (EPD)

Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) Consultants

Southwest Environmental Limited can apply for an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) on your behalf. We are based in the UK, and provide our services Worldwide.

We have been successfully carrying out life cycle assessments of goods and services for over a decade. We can provide help and support in getting an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) issued for your products or services.

How does an Environmental Product Declaration Work?

An Environmental Product Declaration is a short report (often backed up by a larger report) that sets out the impacts of you product or service. For example let us pretend we are obtaining an EPD for a Hammer made by “Company A”.

We would need to find out the impacts created in the manufacturing, transport, use and disposal of the product. In Fact there are potentially 17 subdivisions to include for.

Most if the lifecycle work we undertake is based around Carbon Footprinting, but with an EPD there are special requirements that result in a broader scope:

  • GWP-fossil
  • GWP-biogenic
  • GWP- luluc
  • GWP- total
  • ODP
  • EP-freshwater
  • EP- marine
  • EP-terrestrial
  • POCP
  • ADP-minerals&metals*
  • ADP-fossil*
  • WDP*

The list extends to about 30 factors which need to be footprint, it is quite time consuming, but luckily we can find most of these values in prepared databases.

You wood find footprints for EN1508 materials or services ,and add these together to make up you final footprint and publish an EPD.

A Lot of Numbers. . .

Why Do I need an Environmental Product Declaration EPD?

You probably need one because you customer is asking for one. If they use you products as part of the service they deliver then they will need to feed in data from your EPD, in to their EPD. In that way they can work out their footprint.

If another supplier has a published EPD, they can also compare your product to the other supplier and see who has the lowest carbon.

Environmental Product Declaration EPD Costs

You can get an EPD issued for one simple products for perhaps £8000, this would include our fees and the fees to the 3rd party verifier, and the certification costs. However, costs go up very quickly for more complex products. Even a simple report will be backed up with 50 plus pages of spreadsheet calculations. Unfortunately there is no such thing as an Life Cycle Assessment that can be completed in “One Click”.

Please contact us to talk about your requirements.

Life Cycle Assessment for Amazon Product

Life Cycle Assessment for Amazon Product

We have recently been commissioned to undertake a Life Cycle Assessment for a product being sold on Amazon Marketplace. Despite offering Life Cycle Assessment Services for over 10 years this is the first time we have produced a Life Cycle Assessment for Amazon Product.

Climate Pledge Friendly

If you have been shopping for drones or vegetables on Amazon recently you may have noticed the Climate Pledge Friendly tick box. If you select this, then only Climate Pledge Friendly items will show up in your search.

In order to back up this green claim, it is required that you submit a life cycle assessment (whole life or size reduction) and have it assessed by a third party.

How it Works

We can arrange all aspects of this process for you. We will carry out the required data collections, and or calculations to prove a size reduction, or carbon footprint for your product. We will then provide this information to a 3rd party certification body. Who will also offer you various choices in terms of  carbon offsets.

Once this has been completed we will provide information to you so it can be submitted to Amazon, and you product be included under Climate Pledge Friendly category.

We point out at this point that we are no endorsed in any way by Amazon. But we have been carrying out Life Cycle Assessments for over 10 years. Contact Us to find out more.

Carbon Footprint Work for Shopfitters – PL21

We have this week, complete two sets of carbon footprint calculations for a shopfitting firm in the Southwest of England.

The footprint work we have undertaken, will allow them to easily present a carbon footprint for a job, alongside their cost estimate. Some of their clients find this information important.

The method used was an input / output model. This allows us to calculate the carbon footprint of an item based on it cost. The method is perhaps the least accurate method for carbon footprinting. However, it is much much more likely to be undertaken owing to the simplicity of the method.

Tradition life cycle assessment and the subsequent carbon footprinting work can be be very time consuming, and prone to data gaps, which in turn result in incomplete studies. More time also means more money (greater cost) and as such companies with complex supply chains can be reluctant to undertake traditional LCA carbon footprinting as it coosts such a great deal.

The carbon footprinting values we have provided, slip easily in to existing reporting frameworks, and can be used to provide greater insight, in to the capital carbon involved in the various projects undertaken.

Location: 92PW+FR Ivybridge