Carbon footprint as environmental performance indicator for the manufacturing industry

With the current focus on our climate change impacts, the embodied CO2 emission or "Carbon footprint" is often used as an environmental performance indicator for our products or production activities. The ability of carbon footprint to represent other types of impact like human toxicity, and hence the overall environmental impact is investigated based on life cycle assessments of several materials of major relevance to manufacturing industries. The dependence of the carbon footprint on the assumed scenarios for generation of thermal and electrical energy in the life cycle of the materials is analyzed, and the appropriateness of carbon footprint as an overall indicator of the environmental performance is discussed. (C) 2010 CIRP.