Should office and canteen emissions be included in a product carbon footprint?

A product footprint usually covers the processes that make the product. Office lighting, canteens and staff travel are often left out as non-attributable under the GHG Protocol Product Standard, if you say so. In a company inventory they always count. Keep the two figures separate and state the boundary.

Common practice

• Include: process fuel, electricity, materials, packaging, inbound transport.
• Often excluded: offices, canteens, R&D, business travel.
• State every exclusion in the report.

If the buyer wants everything

Allocate site overheads by production share, such as tonnes or machine hours, and show it as a separate line.

What Senseible does here

Senseible reads bills, fuel invoices and production records into dated, fingerprinted records, so the figure you send a buyer can be traced to its documents.

• Allocate factory electricity to products
• Allocate by machine hours

Sources: GHG Protocol standards, including the Product Standard, GHG Protocol Corporate Standard

Last reviewed 2026-10-23.