How does a merchant exporter without a factory calculate a product carbon footprint?

A merchant exporter starts from the manufacturer's cradle-to-gate footprint per unit, then adds what it adds: freight to its warehouse, repacking and labelling, warehouse energy and export packaging. If the maker gives no figure, use a material-weight or spend-based estimate, labelled as such. You can make the claim without owning a factory.

Whose emissions are in a traded product

Almost all of a traded product's footprint sits with the manufacturer and its suppliers: materials, energy and processing. The exporter's part is smaller but real: transport legs, packaging and storage. A product footprint under ISO 14067 or the GHG Protocol Product Standard covers the product's life cycle, whoever reports it, so the maker's figure is your starting point.

Getting the manufacturer's figure

• Ask for kg CO2e per unit, cradle to gate, with the boundary, year, standard used and the share of primary data.
• Check it is for the exact item, size and material you buy, not a factory average.
• If your buyer uses the PACT data exchange format, ask the maker for its fields, or fill them yourself from what the maker sends.
• Where the maker has only bills, help it allocate its fuel and electricity to your order by units or machine hours.

When the maker cannot give data

1. Material weights: weigh each material in one unit and apply a secondary factor per kg, with its source.
2. Spend-based: only if there is no weight, using the maker's price, not your selling price, and labelled as spend-based with wider uncertainty.
3. Mark the result as secondary data, and ask the maker again next year.

What you add, and what you may leave out

• Inbound freight: tonnes x km x a factor for the mode and truck class.
• Repacking and export packaging: kg of each material x its factor.
• Warehouse electricity: allocate by units or volume handled, x 0.710 kg CO2 per kWh.
• Office overhead: the GHG Protocol Product Standard does not require non-attributable processes such as administration. Say whether you included it.

Illustrative: 1,000 cotton shirts

• Manufacturer's cradle-to-gate figure: 5.0 kg CO2e per shirt (illustrative)
• Inbound truck: 2 t x 400 km = 800 tonne-km x an illustrative 0.1 kg CO2e = 80 kg; 0.08 kg per shirt
• Polybags and cartons: 0.05 kg CO2e per shirt (illustrative)
• Warehouse share: 60 kWh x 0.710 = 42.6 kg; 0.043 kg per shirt
• Total to the exporter's gate: 5.0 + 0.08 + 0.05 + 0.043 = 5.17 kg CO2e per shirt

All factors except the grid factor are illustrative. The maker's figure decides most of the result, so its quality matters most.

What Senseible does here

Senseible keeps manufacturers' invoices, and any footprint they send, in the Scope 3 supplier evidence trail, and provides spend-based estimates labelled with wider uncertainty where no supplier data exist. Its logistics calculator estimates freight from tonnes, distance and mode.

• Goods bought from a trader
• Can I use my supplier's product footprint?
• Buyer asked for a product footprint
• Logistics emissions calculator

Sources: GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard (2011), ISO 14067:2018, Carbon footprint of products, WBCSD PACT Methodology, version 3

Last reviewed 2026-10-18.