What is the carbon footprint of titanium dioxide pigment per tonne?
Titanium dioxide is made from ilmenite or rutile by the sulphate or chloride route. Both use a lot of energy, and the chloride route also uses petroleum coke, which releases process CO2. For paint and plastics makers it is often a large share of their raw material footprint.
Main sources
- Petroleum coke in chlorination (chloride route).
- Acid digestion and calcination (sulphate route).
- Steam, fuel and electricity throughout.
For paint makers
Ask the pigment supplier for a figure per tonne and the route used. It often matters more than your own factory's power.
What Senseible does here
Senseible reads the energy invoices behind the making stage into a fingerprinted Scope 1 and 2 record, and keeps material invoices on the Scope 3 trail. Material factors come from your supplier or a named database and are labelled with their source, so the product figure can be traced line by line.
Sources: GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard, IPCC 2006 Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories
Last reviewed 2026-10-22.